[John Hay]
Florence, Italy.Ⓐapparatus note 31st January 1904.Ⓐapparatus note
A quarter of a century ago I was visiting John Hay, now Secretary of StateⒺexplanatory note,Ⓐapparatus note at Whitelaw Reid’s house in New York, which Hay was occupying for a few months while ReidⒶapparatus note was absent on a holiday in Europe. Temporarily also, Hay was editing Reid’s paper, the New York Tribune Ⓔexplanatory note.Ⓐapparatus note I remember two incidents of that Sunday visit particularly well, and I think I shall use them presently to illustrate something which I intend to say. One of the incidents is immaterial, and I hardly know why it is that it has stayed with me so many years. I must introduce it with a word or two.Ⓐapparatus note I had known John Hay a good many years, I had known him when he was an obscure young editorial writer on the TribuneⒶapparatus note in Horace Greeley’s time, earning three or four times the salary he got,Ⓐapparatus note considering the high character of the work which came from his pen. In those earlier days he was a picture to look at, for beauty of feature, perfection of form and grace of carriage and movement. He had a charm aboutⒶapparatus note him of a sort quite unusual to my westernⒶapparatus note ignorance and inexperience—a charm of manner, intonation, apparently native and unstudied elocution, and all that—the groundworkⒶapparatus note of itⒶapparatus note native, the ease of it, the polish of it, the winning naturalness of it, acquired in Europe where he had been Chargé d’Affaires some time at the Court of Vienna. He was joyous andⒶapparatus note cordial, a most pleasant comrade.Ⓐapparatus note
Now I am coming to it. John Hay was not afraid of Horace Greeley.
I will leave that remark in a paragraph by itself; it cannot be made too conspicuous. John Hay was the only man who ever served Horace Greeley on the TribuneⒶapparatus note of whom that can be said. In the past few years,Ⓐapparatus note since Hay has been occupying the post of Secretary of State with a succession of foreign difficulties on his handsⒶapparatus note Ⓔexplanatory note such as have not fallen to the share of any previous occupant of that chair, perhaps, when we consider the magnitude of the matters involved, we have seen that that courage of his youth is his possession still,Ⓐapparatus note and that he is not any more scarable by kings and emperors and their fleets and armiesⒺexplanatory note than he was by Horace Greeley.
[begin page 223]I arrive at the application now. That Sunday morning, twenty-five years ago, Hay and I had been chatting and laughing and carrying-on almost like our earlier selves of ’67, when the door opened and Mrs. HayⒺexplanatory note, gravely clad, gloved, bonneted, and just from church, and fragrant with the odors of Presbyterian sanctity,Ⓐapparatus note stood in it. We rose to our feet at once, of course,—Ⓐapparatus noterose through a swiftly falling temperature—a temperature which at the beginning was soft and summerlike, but which was turning our breath and all other damp things to frost crystals by the time we were erect—but we got no opportunity to say the pretty and polite thing and offer the homage due:Ⓐapparatus note the comely young matron forestalled us. She came forward smileless, with disapproval written all over her face, said most coldly, “Good morning Mr. Clemens,”Ⓐapparatus note and passed on and out.
There was an embarrassed pause—I may say a very embarrassed pause. If Hay was waiting for me to speak, it was a mistake; I couldn’t think of a word. It was soon plain to me that the bottom had fallen out of his vocabulary, too. When I was able to walk I started toward the door, and Hay, grown gray in a single night, so to speak, limped feebly at my side, making no moan, saying no word. At the door his ancient courtesy rose and bravely flickered for a moment, then went out. That is to say, he tried to ask me to call again, but at that point his ancient sincerity rose against the fiction and squelched it. Then he tried another remark, and that one he got through with. He said pathetically, and apologetically,Ⓐapparatus note
“She is very strict about Sunday.”
More than once in these past few years I have heard admiring and grateful people say, and have said it myself—
“He is not afraid of this whole nation of eighty millions when his duty requires him to do an unpopular thing.”
Twenty-five years have gone by since then, and through manifold experiences I have learned that no one’sⒶapparatus note courage is absolutely perfect; that there is always some one who is able to modify his pluck.
The other incidentⒶapparatus note of that visit was this: in trading remarks concerning our ages I confessed to forty-two and Hay to fortyⒶapparatus note Ⓔexplanatory note. Then he asked if I had begun to write my autobiography, and I said I hadn’t. He said that I ought to begin at once, and that I had already lost two years. Then he said in substance this:
“At forty a man reaches the top of the hill of life and starts down on the sunset side. The ordinary man, the average man, not to particularize too closely and say the commonplace man, has at that age succeeded or failed; in either case he has lived all of his life that is likely to be worth recording; also in either case the life lived is worth setting down, and cannot fail to be interesting if he comes as near to telling the truth about himself as he can. And he will tell the truth in spite of himself, for his facts and his fictions will work loyally together for the protection of the reader; each fact and each fiction will be a dab of paint, each will fall in its right place, and together they will paint his portrait; not the portrait he thinks they are [begin page 224] painting, but his real portrait, the inside of him, the soul of him, his character. Without intending to lie he will lie all the time; not bluntly, consciously, not dully unconsciously, but half-consciously—consciousness in twilight; a soft and gentle and merciful twilight which makes his general form comely, with his virtuous prominences and projections discernible and his ungracious ones in shadow. His truths will be recognizable as truths, his modifications of facts which would tell against him will go for nothing, the reader will see the fact through the film and know his man. ThereⒶapparatus note is a subtle devilish something or other about autobiographical composition that defeats all the writer’s attempts to paint his portrait his way.”
Hay meant that he and I were ordinary average commonplace people, and I did not resent my share of the verdict,Ⓐapparatus note but nursed my wound in silence. His idea that we had finished our work in life, passed the summit and were westward bound down hill,Ⓐapparatus note with me two years ahead of him and neither of us with anything further to do as benefactors to mankind,Ⓐapparatus note was all a mistake. I had written four books then, possibly five. I have been drowning the world in literary wisdom ever since, volume after volume; since that day’s sun went down heⒶapparatus note has been the historian of Mr. LincolnⒺexplanatory note, and his book will never perish; he has been AmbassadorⒶapparatus note, brilliant orator, competent and admirable Secretary of State, and would be President next year if we were a properly honest and grateful nationⒶapparatus note instead of an ungrateful one, a nation which has usually not been willing to have a chief magistrate of gold when it could get one of tin.Ⓐapparatus note
I had lost two years, but I resolved to make up that loss. I resolved to begin my autobiography at once. I did begin it, but the resolve melted away and disappeared in a week and I threw my beginning away. Since then, about every three or four years I have made other beginnings and thrown them away. Once I tried the experiment of a diary, intending to inflate that into an autobiography when its accumulationⒶapparatus note should furnish enough material, but that experiment lasted only a week; it took me half of every night to set down the history of the day, and at the week’s end I did not like the result.
Within the last eight or ten years I have made several attempts to do the autobiography in one way or another with a pen, but the result was not satisfactory, it was too literary. With the pen in one’s hand, narrative is a difficult art; narrative should flow as flows the brook down through the hills and the leafy woodlands, its course changed by every boulder it comes across and by every grass-clad gravelly spur that projects into its path; its surface broken but its course not stayed by rocks and gravel on the bottom in the shoal places; a brook that never goes straight for a minute, but goes, and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes fetching a horseshoe three-quarters of a mile around and at the end of the circuit flowing within a yard of the path it traversed an hour before; but always going, and always following at least one law, always loyal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no law. Nothing to do but make the trip; the how of it is not important so that the trip is made.
With a pen in the hand the narrative stream is a canal; it moves slowly, smoothly, decorously, sleepily, it has no blemish except that it is all blemish. It is too literary, too prim, too nice; the gait and style and movement are not suited to narrative. That canal stream is always reflecting; it is its nature, it can’t help it. Its slick shiny surface is interested in everything it passes along the banks, cows, foliage, flowers, everything. And so it wastes a lot of time in reflections.
I was visiting John Hay, now Secretary of State] John Milton Hay (1838–1905) and Clemens probably first met in 1867 through a mutual friend, David Gray of the Buffalo Courier. Hay, like Clemens, grew up in a small town on the Mississippi River—Warsaw, Illinois, which is less than sixty miles from Hannibal, Missouri—and this common background fostered their friendship. Hay graduated from Brown University and was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1861. But he soon gave up the law to work as assistant private secretary to Abraham Lincoln (1861–65), living in the White House and becoming his intimate companion. At the end of the war Hay was appointed secretary to the U.S. legation in Paris, then chargé d’affaires at Vienna (1867–68), and secretary of legation at Madrid (1869–70). In 1870 he accepted an editorial position on the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley, and then, after Greeley’s death in 1872, assisted the new editor, Whitelaw Reid. He gave up his Tribune position in 1875 and pursued a literary career as a poet, novelist, and biographer of Lincoln (see the note at 224.14–15). He achieved his chief fame, however, as a diplomat and statesman, serving as assistant secretary of state (1878–81), ambassador to Great Britain (1897–98), and secretary of state (1898–1905) (31 Dec 1870 to Reid, L4, 292–93, n. 3; 26 Jan 1872 to Redpath, L5, 35 n. 2; Thayer 1915, 1:83, 330–35).
Whitelaw Reid’s house in New York . . . editing Reid’s paper, the New York Tribune] Whitelaw Reid (1837–1912), a native of Ohio, joined the staff of the New York Tribune in 1868. After the death of Horace Greeley, its founder and editor, he became the owner as well as the editor-in-chief, and soon solicited contributions from Clemens. Reid was married in April 1881 and for six months, while he traveled in Europe with his bride, Hay replaced him as editor and lived in his New York house. Reid later served as minister to France (1889–92) and ambassador to Great Britain (1905–12) (link note following 20–22 Dec 1872 to Twichell, L5, 263; Thayer 1915, 1:405, 451–55).
a succession of foreign difficulties on his hands] In 1898 Hay inherited from his predecessor a dispute with Canada over Alaska’s boundaries, which was not finally resolved until 1903. He helped to negotiate the Treaty of Paris (1898), ending the Spanish-American War. During the Boxer Rebellion (1900) he took action to rescue the Peking hostages, while successfully promoting the “Open Door Policy” toward China. Most recently, he had been responsible for several treaties (1900–1903) that allowed the United States to build the Panama Canal and secure its control over the Canal Zone (Thayer 1915, 2:202–49).
not any more scarable by kings and emperors and their fleets and armies] Clemens alludes to the conflict in 1901–3 with the German kaiser and his allies, who sent a fleet of warships to blockade Venezuelan ports and threatened to invade the country, in violation of the Monroe Doctrine (Thayer 1915, 2:284–90).
Mrs. Hay] Hay was married on 4 February 1874 to Clara L. Stone (1849–1915), whose father, Amasa Stone, was a wealthy contractor, railroad magnate, and philanthropist in Cleveland, Ohio. The couple had four children, and by Hay’s own account, their marriage was a happy one. In 1905, shortly before his death, he recorded in his diary, “I have lived to be old, something I never expected in my youth. I have had many blessings, domestic happiness being the greatest of all” (Thayer 1915, 1:351, 2:408).
I confessed to forty-two and Hay to forty] At the time of his residence in Reid’s New York house, Hay was forty-two and Clemens was forty-five. It is likely that Clemens’s recollection here conflated more than one discussion with Hay, and that their conversation about autobiography took place several years earlier, in 1877 or 1878.
the historian of Mr. Lincoln] Hay and a collaborator, John G. Nicolay (1832–1901), published several works about Lincoln. Their association began in 1860, when Nicolay was appointed Lincoln’s private secretary and recruited Hay to be his assistant. During their tenure in the White House they began to select materials for a biography of Lincoln, and in 1874 began to solicit additional material from Lincoln’s son, Robert. In 1885 they signed a contract with the Century Company, receiving an unprecedented fifty thousand dollars for the serialization rights. Their biography was published in the Century Magazine from 1886 to 1890, and in the latter year was issued in ten volumes as Abraham Lincoln: A History. In a review of the work William Dean Howells wrote, “We can be glad of the greatest biography of Lincoln not only as the most important work yet accomplished in American history, but as one of the noblest achievements of literary art” (Howells 1891, 479). Four years later, in 1894, Hay and Nicolay published Abraham Lincoln: Complete Works (Thayer 1915, 2:16–18, 49).
Notes on “Innocents Abroad”
Source documents.
TS Jean (lost) Typescript made in 1904 by Jean Clemens in Florence from Isabel Lyon’s handwritten record of Clemens’s dictation; now lost.TS2 Typescript, leaves numbered 68–80, made from TS Jean and revised.
TS4 Typescript, leaves numbered 65–77, made from TS Jean.
NAR 20pf (lost) Galley proofs of NAR 20, typeset from the revised TS2; now lost.
NAR 20 North American Review 185 (5 July 1907), 465–71.
TS2 and TS4 derive from an earlier typescript, now lost, prepared in 1904 in Florence by Jean Clemens, who transcribed the longhand notes taken by Isabel Lyon from Clemens’s dictation. Since either typescript may incorporate authorial readings not present in the other, all of their variants have been reported. When TS2 and TS4 agree, they confirm the readings of the missing typescript. Clemens revised TS2 to create printer’s copy for NAR 20. Collation reveals no evidence of authorial revision on the lost NAR 20pf.
On the last page of TS2 (page 80) is a list of topics, which Clemens canceled (the corresponding page in TS4, page 79, is missing): ‘In completing A. A. speak of these: Harte | Webb | Prentice Mulford | Noah Brooks | Evans | Riley | Greeley the Inexhaustible | Johns ditto | Soule | Hastings | (Sewell) | Mrs. Clemens reads proofs (?)’. None of these people—all of them, except Greeley, acquaintances from Clemens’s years in California and Washington, D.C., in 1861–68—is discussed in other material dating from 1904, nor is there any mention of his wife’s reading the proofs of The Innocents Abroad, which he did allude to, however, in the AD of 14 February 1906. Clemens mentions Bret Harte, Prentice Mulford, Charles Henry Webb, and Hastings in the AD of 13 June 1906 (for Harte and Mulford see “Ralph Keeler,” note at 150.2–4; for Webb see L1, 314 n. 5, and L2, 6–7; Hastings has not been identified). Riley is mentioned in the AD of 15 January 1906 (see the Explanatory Note at 282.15–18), and the story of Greeley and Hank Monk is told in the AD of 31 August 1906 (see also “Horace Greeley”). Clemens discusses Noah Brooks in the present piece (see the Explanatory Note at 228.3–6). There are no comments in the autobiography about Albert S. Evans, Frank Soulé, G. T. Sewall, or Tremenhere Johns. For Albert S. Evans see ET&S2, 329; for Frank Soulé see 5 Nov 73 to Bliss, L5, 465 n. 13; for G. T. Sewall see 8 and 9 Mar 1862 to Clagett, L1, 172 n. 6. Tremenhere Johns (1839–75) was a San Francisco journalist, drama critic, and playwright (The Bohemian 1 [16 Jan 75]: 8).
Marginal Notes on TS2 Concerning Publication in the NAR
Location on TS | Writer, Medium | Exact Transcription | Explanation |
TS2, p. 68 | SLC, ink | I | use as the first section of an NAR installment |
TS2, p. 68 | SLC, ink | Use it. 4½ or 5 Review pages. |
Dictated in Florence, Italy, April, 1904.Ⓐapparatus note
I will begin with a note upon the dedication. I wrote the book in the months of March and April , in San Francisco. It was published in August 1869. Three years afterward Mr. Goodman,Ⓐapparatus note of Virginia City, Nevada, on whose newspaper I had served ten years before,Ⓐapparatus note came East, and we were walking down BroadwayⒺexplanatory note one day when he said—
“HowⒶapparatus note did you come to steal Oliver Wendell Holmes’s dedication and put it in your book?”
I made a careless and inconsequential answer, for I supposed he was joking. But he assured me that he was in earnest. He said—
“I’mⒶapparatus note not discussing the question of whether you stole it or didn’t—for that is a question that can be settled in the first bookstore we come to—I am only asking you how you came to steal it, for that is where my curiosity is focalized.”
I couldn’t accommodate him with this information, as I hadn’t it in stock. I could have made oath that I had not stolen anything, therefore my vanity was not hurt nor my spirit troubled. At bottom I supposed that he had mistaken another book for mine, and was now getting himself into an untenable place and preparing sorrow for himself and triumph for me. We entered a bookstore and he asked for “The Innocents Abroad” and for the dainty little blue and gold edition of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poems. He opened the books, exposed their dedicationsⒺexplanatory note and said—
“ReadⒶapparatus note them. It is plain that the author of the second one stole the first one, isn’t it?”
I was very much ashamed, and unspeakably astonished. We continued our walk,Ⓐapparatus note but I was not able to throw any gleam of light upon that original question of his. I could not remember ever having seen Dr. Holmes’s dedication. I knew the poems, but the dedication was new to me.
I did not get hold of the key to that secret until months afterward, then it came in a curious way, and yet it was a natural way; for the natural way provided by nature and the construction of the human mind for the discovery of a forgotten event is to employ another forgotten event for its resurrection.
I received a letter from the Rev. Dr. Rising, who had been rectorⒶapparatus note of the Episcopal church in Virginia City in my time, in which letter Dr. Rising made reference to certain things which had happened to us in the Sandwich Islands six years beforeⒺexplanatory note; among otherⒶapparatus note things he made casual mention of the Honolulu Hotel’s poverty in the matter of literature. At first I did not see the bearing of the remark, it called nothing to my mind. But presently it did—with a flash! There was but one book in Mr. Kirchhof’s hotel, and that was the first volume of Dr. Holmes’s blue and gold series. I had had a fortnight’s chance to get well acquainted with its contents, for I had ridden around the big island (Hawaii) on horseback and had brought back so many saddle boils that if there had been a duty on them it would have bankrupted me to pay it. They kept me in my room, unclothed, and in persistent pain for two weeks, with no company but cigars and the little volume of poems. Of course I read them almost constantly; I read them from beginning to end, then read them backwards, then began in the middle and read them [begin page 226] both ways, then read them wrong end first and upside down. In a word, I read the book to rags, and was infinitely grateful to the hand that wrote it.
Here we have an exhibition of what repetition can do, when persisted in daily and hourly over a considerable stretch of time, where one is merely reading for entertainment, without thought or intention of preserving in the memory that which is read. It is a process which in the course of years driesⒶapparatus note all the juice out of a familiar verse of Scripture, leaving nothing but a saplessⒶapparatus note husk behind. In that case you at least know the origin of the husk, but in the case in point I apparently preserved the husk but presently forgot whence it came. It lay lost in some dim corner of my memory a year or two, then came forward when I needed a dedication, and was promptly mistaken by me as a child of my own happy fancy.
I was new, I was ignorant, the mysteries of the human mind were a sealed book to me as yet, and I stupidly looked upon myself as a tough and unforgivable criminal. I wrote to Dr. Holmes and told him the whole disgraceful affairⒺexplanatory note, implored him in impassioned language to believe that I had neverⒶapparatus note intended to commit this crime, and was unaware that I had committed it until I was confronted with the awful evidence. I have lost his answer;Ⓐapparatus note I could better have afforded to lose an uncle. Of these I had a surplus, many of them of no real value to me, but that letter was beyond price, beyond uncledom,Ⓐapparatus note and unsparable. In it Dr. Holmes laughed the kindest and healingest laugh over the whole matter, and at considerable length and in happy phrase assured me that there was no crime in unconscious plagiarism; that I committed it every day, that he committed it every day, that every man alive on the earth who writes or speaks commits it every day and not merely once or twice but every time he opens his mouth; that all our phrasings are spiritualized shadows cast multitudinously from our readings; that no happy phrase of ours is ever quite original with us, there is nothing of our own in it except some slight change born of our temperament, character, environment, teachings and associations; that this slight change differentiates it from another man’s manner of saying it, stamps it with our special style, and makes it our own for the time being; all the rest of it being old, mouldyⒶapparatus note, antique, and smelling of the breath of a thousand generations of them that have passed it over their teethⒶapparatus note before!
In the thirty-oddⒶapparatus note years which have come and goneⒶapparatus note since then, I have satisfied myself that what Dr. Holmes said was true.
I wish to make a note upon the preface of the “Innocents.” In the last paragraph of that brief preface, I speak ofⒶapparatus note the proprietors of the Daily Alta CaliforniaⒶapparatus note having “waived their rights” in certain lettersⒺexplanatory note which I wrote for that journal while absent on the Quaker CityⒶapparatus note trip. I was young then, I am white-headed now, but the insult of that word rankles yet, now that I am reading that paragraph for the first time in many years, reading itⒶapparatus note for the first time since it was writtenⒶapparatus note, perhaps. There were rights, it is true—such rights as the strong are able to acquire over the weak and the absent. Early in ’66 George Barnes invited me to resign my reportership on his paper,Ⓐapparatus note the San Francisco Morning CallⒺexplanatory note,Ⓐapparatus note and for some months thereafter I was without money or work;Ⓐapparatus note then I had a pleasant turn of fortune. The proprietors of the Sacramento Union,Ⓐapparatus note a great and influential daily journal, sent me to the Sandwich Islands to write four letters a month at twenty dollars apiece. I was there four or five months, and returned to find myself about the best known honest manⒶapparatus note on the Pacific coastⒶapparatus note. Thomas MaguireⒶapparatus note, proprietor of several theatres, said that now was the time to make my fortune—strike while the iron was hot!—Ⓐapparatus note [begin page 227] break into the lecture field! I did it. I announced a lecture on the Sandwich IslandsⒺexplanatory note, closing the advertisement with the remarkⒶapparatus note “Admission one dollar; doors open at half pastⒶapparatus note 7, the trouble begins at 8.”Ⓔexplanatory note A true prophecy. The trouble certainly did begin at 8, when I found myself in front of the only audience I had ever faced, for the fright which pervaded me from head to foot was paralysingⒶapparatus note. It lasted two minutes and was as bitter as death, the memory of it is indestructible, but it had its compensations, for it made me immune from timidity before audiences for all time to come. I lectured in all the principal Californian towns and in Nevada, then lectured once or twice more in San Francisco, then retired from the field rich—for me—and laid out a plan to sail westwardⒶapparatus note from San FranciscoⒶapparatus note and go around the worldⒺexplanatory note. The proprietors of the AltaⒶapparatus note engaged me to write an account of the trip for that paper—fifty letters of a column and a half each, which would be about two thousand words per letter, and the pay to be twenty dollars per letterⒺexplanatory note.
I went East to St. Louis to say good-bye to my mother, and then I was bitten by the prospectus of Captain Duncan of the Quaker CityⒶapparatus note ExcursionⒶapparatus note Ⓔexplanatory note, and I ended by joining it. During the trip I wrote and sent the fifty letters; six of them miscarried,Ⓐapparatus note and I wrote six new ones to complete my contractⒺexplanatory note. Then I put together a lecture on the trip and delivered it in San Francisco at great and satisfactory pecuniary profit, then I branched out into the country and was aghast at the result: I had been entirely forgotten, I never had people enough in my houses to sit as a jury of inquest on my lost reputation! I inquired into this curious condition of things and found that the thrifty owners of that prodigiously rich AltaⒶapparatus note newspaper had copyrighted all those poor little twenty-dollar letters, and had threatened with prosecution any journal which should venture to copy a paragraph from them!Ⓐapparatus note
And there I was! I had contracted to furnish a large book, concerning the excursion, to the American Publishing CompanyⒶapparatus note of Hartford, and I supposed I should need all those letters to fill it out with. I was in an uncomfortable situation—that is,Ⓐapparatus note if the proprietors of this stealthily acquired copyright should refuse to let me use the letters. That is just whatⒶapparatus note they did; Mr. Mac—something—I have forgotten the rest of his name*—Ⓐapparatus notesaid his firm were going to make a book out of the letters in order to get back the thousand dollars which they had paid for them. I said that if they had acted fairly and honorably, and had allowed the country press to use the letters or portions of them, my lecture-skirmish on the coast would have paid me ten thousand dollars, whereas the AltaⒶapparatus note had lost me that amount. Then he offered a compromise: he would publish the book and allow me 10 per centⒶapparatus note royalty on it. The compromise did not appeal to me, and I said so. I was now quite unknown outside of San Francisco, the book’sⒶapparatus note sale would be confined to that city, and my royalty would not pay me enough to board me three months; whereas my easternⒶapparatus note contract, if carried out, could be profitable to me, for I had a sort of reputation on the Atlantic seaboard acquired through the publication of six excursion-letters in the New York TribuneⒶapparatus note and one or two in the Herald.Ⓐapparatus note
In the end Mr. MacCrellishⒶapparatus note agreed to suppress his book, on certain conditions: in my preface I must thank the
AltaⒶapparatus note
for waiving its “rights” and granting me permission. I objected
*May 20, 1906. I recall it now—MacCrellishⒺexplanatory note. M. T.Ⓐapparatus note [begin page 228] to the thanks. I could not with any large degree of sincerity thank the AltaⒶapparatus note for bankrupting my lecture-raid. After considerable debate my point was conceded and the thanks left out.
Noah Brooks was editorⒶapparatus note of the AltaⒶapparatus note at the time, a man of sterling character and equipped with a right heart, also a good historian where facts were not essential. In biographical sketches of me written many years afterward (1902),Ⓐapparatus note he was quite eloquent in praises of the generosity of the AltaⒶapparatus note peopleⒺexplanatory note in giving to me without compensation a book which, as history had afterward shown, was worth a fortune. After all the fuss, I did not levy heavily upon the AltaⒶapparatus note letters. I found that they were newspaper matter, not book matter. They had been written here and there and yonder, as opportunity had given me a chance working-momentⒶapparatus note or two during our feverish flight around about Europe or in the furnace-heat of my stateroom on board the Quaker City,Ⓐapparatus note therefore they were loosely constructed, and needed to have some of the wind and water squeezed out of them. I used several of them—ten or twelve, perhaps. I wrote the rest of “The Innocents Abroad” in sixty days, and I could have added a fortnight’s labor with the pen and gotten along without the letters altogether. I was very young in those days, exceedingly young, marvelouslyⒶapparatus note young, younger than I am now, younger than I shall ever be again, by hundreds of years. I worked every night from eleven or twelve until broad day in the morning, and as I did two hundred thousand words in the sixty days,Ⓐapparatus note the average was more than three thousand words a day—nothing for Sir Walter Scott, nothing for Louis Stevenson, nothing for plenty of other people, but quite handsome for me. In 1897, when we were living in Tedworth Square, London, and I was writing the book called “Following the Equator” my average was eighteen hundred words a day; here in Florence,Ⓐapparatus note (1904), my average seems to be fourteen hundred words per sitting of four or five hours.*
I was deducing from the above that I have been slowing down steadily in these thirty-six years, but I perceive that my statistics have a defect: three thousand words in the spring of 1868 when I was working seven or eight or nine hours at a sitting has little or no advantage over the sitting of to-day, covering half the time and producing half the output. Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force:
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”Ⓔexplanatory note
*WithⒶapparatus note the pen, I mean. This Autobiography is dictated, not written.Ⓐapparatus note
Mr. Goodman, of Virginia City, Nevada, on whose newspaper I had served ten years before, . . . walking down Broadway] After Clemens joined the staff of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in the fall of 1862, Joseph T. Goodman was quick to recognize his talent, and the two became lifelong friends (see AD, 9 Jan 1906, note at 252.32–253.1). The meeting described here took place in late December 1869 or early January 1870, when Goodman stopped in New York City en route to Europe ( L1: 9 Sept 1862 to Clagett, 241 n. 5; 21 Oct 1862 to OC and MEC, 242 n. 2; 18 and 19 Dec 1869 to OLL, L3, 432 n. 2). In his original dictation, after the word “before,” Clemens added, “and of whom I have had much to say in the book called ‘Roughing It’—I seem to be overloading the sentence and I apologize—.” He deleted the remark when revising the typescript for publication in the North American Review (NAR 12). It is also omitted here, because he did not make the revision as a “softening” to accommodate a contemporary readership.
dainty little blue and gold edition of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poems . . . exposed their dedications] Starting in 1856, the Boston firm of Ticknor and Fields published a series of handy volumes containing the best contemporary and classic literature, distinctively bound in blue cloth with gilt spine and edges. Poems, by physician and author Oliver Wendell Holmes, was first printed in this “Blue and Gold” series in 1862. The dedication Clemens refers to was that of the section entitled “Songs in Many Keys”: “to | the most indulgent of readers, | the kindest of critics, | MY BELOVED MOTHER, | all that is least unworthy of her | in this volume | Is Dedicated | by her affectionate son” (Holmes 1862). Clemens’s dedication in The Innocents Abroad read: “To | My Most Patient Reader | and | Most Charitable Critic, | MY AGED MOTHER, | This Volume is Affectionately | Inscribed” (SLC 1869a, iii; Winship 1995, 122–23).
letter from the Rev. Dr. Rising . . . Sandwich Islands six years before] The Reverend Franklin S. Rising (1833?–68) arrived in Virginia City in April 1862 to become the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. Suffering from poor health, he sailed for the Sandwich Islands in February 1866 to convalesce. Clemens was in the islands from March to July 1866, writing travel letters for the Sacramento Union, which he later used as the basis for chapters 63–74 of Roughing It (see “My Debut as a Literary Person,” note at 128.22–24). Rising appears in chapter 47 of Roughing It as the naive minister baffled by the slang of Scotty Briggs. Since Rising died in a steamboat accident in December 1868, Clemens must have misremembered the year of his letter, which is not known to survive (30 July, 6, 7, 10, and 24 Aug 1866 to JLC and PAM, L1, 352, 354 n. 3; 19 and 20 Dec 1868 to OLL, L2, 333, 337 n. 2; RI 1993, 669).
I wrote to Dr. Holmes and told him the whole disgraceful affair] No such letter has been found, although in 1869 Clemens sent a copy of The Innocents Abroad to Holmes, who replied with a warm letter of appreciation (30 Sept 1869 to Holmes, L3, 364–65, 365–66 n. 1).
the proprietors of the Daily Alta California having “waived their rights” in certain letters] The preface concluded: “In this volume I have used portions of letters which I wrote for the Daily Alta California, of San Francisco, the proprietors of that journal having waived their rights and given me the necessary permission” (SLC 1869a). Clemens’s dispute over his right to reuse his travel letters—which he describes in more detail below—took place in February and late April or early May 1868 (L2: 22? Feb 1868 to MEC, 198–99; 5 May 1868 to Bliss, 215–16; 27 and 28 Feb 1869 to Fairbanks, L3, 125 n. 3).
Early in ’66 George Barnes . . . San Francisco Morning Call] Clemens worked as the local reporter for the Morning Call from June to October 1864 (not 1866). His boss, George Eustace Barnes (d. 1897), was a Canadian who moved to New York City as a boy and began his career there as a printer for the Tribune. Although he recognized Clemens’s “peculiar genius,” he soon discovered that his new employee was not suited for his tedious but demanding assignment to provide news about theaters, law courts, and other items of local interest. In chapter 58 of Roughing It Clemens noted, “I neglected my duties and became about worthless, as a reporter for a brisk newspaper. And at last one of the proprietors took me aside, with a charity I still remember with considerable respect, and gave me an opportunity to resign my berth and so save myself the disgrace of a dismissal” ( RI 1993, 404; CofC, 11–25; see also AD, 13 June 1906).
Thomas Maguire, proprietor of several theatres . . . a lecture on the Sandwich Islands] Maguire (1820–96), originally from Ireland, was San Francisco’s best-known theatrical manager for several decades. He arrived in California in 1849 and in 1850 opened his first theater. In the 1860s he owned the Opera House, on Washington Street near Montgomery, as well as Maguire’s Academy of Music, a more splendid theater on Pine Street near Montgomery, where Clemens made his lecture debut on 2 October 1866. The lecture, which he later repeatedly revised, held a place in his platform repertoire for nearly a decade. For his own earlier account of the experience see chapter 78 of Roughing It ( RI 1993, 532–36, 741–43; Lloyd 1876, 153–54).
“Admission one dollar; doors open at half past 7, the trouble begins at 8.”] The advertisement in the San Francisco Alta California offered “Dress Circle” seats at one dollar, and “Family Circle” seats at fifty cents: “Doors open at 7 o’clock. The trouble to begin at 8 o’clock” (“Maguire’s Academy of Music,” 2 Oct 1866, 4). The phrase soon became proverbial. Less than a year later Clemens found it scrawled on the cell wall of a New York City jail (SLC 1867i).
I lectured in all the principal Californian towns and in Nevada . . . retired from the field rich . . . go around the world] Clemens toured the towns of northern California and western Nevada Territory, accompanied by his friend and agent Denis E. McCarthy, from 11 October to 10 November 1866. He lectured again in San Francisco on 16 November, and then in several other Bay Area towns, before making a final appearance in San Francisco on 10 December. According to Paine, Clemens earned about four hundred dollars from his first San Francisco lecture, after paying his expenses, but his profit from the ensuing tour is not known. His intention to visit the Orient and then circumnavigate the world grew out of an invitation from Anson Burlingame, the U.S. minister to China, who befriended him in the Sandwich Islands in June 1866 and urged him to visit Peking in early 1867 (see chapter 79 of Roughing It; RI 1993, 537–42, 743–45; MTB, 1:294; 27 June 1866 to JLC and PAM, L1, 347–48; see also AD, 20 Feb 1906).
proprietors of the Alta . . . twenty dollars per letter] For an analysis of how much Clemens was paid see 15 Apr 1867 to JLC and family, L2, 23–24 n. 1.
prospectus of Captain Duncan of the Quaker City Excursion] Charles C. Duncan (1821–98) of Bath, Maine, went to sea as a boy and took command of a ship while still a young man. In 1853 he became a New York shipping and commission merchant, but his business went bankrupt in 1865. Hoping to recover from this loss, in 1867 he arranged an excursion to Europe and the Holy Land sponsored by the parishioners of Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. Duncan leased the Quaker City and had the ship completely refitted to provide the passengers with comfortable accommodations. The prospectus described the planned itinerary for the voyage (which was to last from early June to late October), the available shipboard amenities, the guidelines for side trips ashore, the cost of passage ($1,250 in currency), and estimated personal expenses ($5 per day in gold). All passengers were required to obtain the approval of a “committee on applications” (for details of the excursion see L2: 15 Apr 1867 to JLC and family, 23–26 nn. 1–4; “Prospectus of the Quaker City Excursion,” 382–84).
I wrote and sent the fifty letters . . . complete my contract] For Clemens’s list of the letters he thought he had written, and the number actually published, see 1–2 Sept 1867 to JLC and family, L2, 89–90 n. 1.
footnote MacCrellish] Frederick MacCrellish (1828–82) went to California from Pennsylvania in 1852 and worked on two San Francisco newspapers, the Herald and the Ledger. In 1854 he became the commercial editor of the Alta California, and a part owner two years later (2? Mar 1867 to the Proprietors of the San Francisco Alta California, L2, 17 n. 1).
Noah Brooks . . . praises of the generosity of the Alta people] Brooks (1830–1903) began his journalism career in Boston, and during the Civil War corresponded from Washington for the Sacramento Union. Clemens met Brooks in 1865 or 1866, when he was the managing editor of the Alta California. After returning East in 1871, Brooks worked for both the New York Tribune and the Times, and throughout his life wrote books on travel and history, as well as personal memoirs (7 Mar 1873 to Reid, L5, 313 n. 2). He is known to have written only one biographical sketch of Clemens: “Mark Twain in California,” published in the Century Magazine in 1898. His account of the dispute, however, defends Clemens, not the “Alta people”:
During the summer of that year, while Clemens was in the Eastern States, there came to us a statement, through the medium of the Associated Press, that he was preparing for publication his letters which had been printed in the “Alta California.” The proprietors of that newspaper were wroth. They regarded the letters as their private property. Had they not bought and paid for them? Could they have been written if they had not furnished the money to pay the expenses of the writer? And although up to that moment there had been no thought of making in San Francisco a book of Mark Twain’s letters from abroad, the proprietors of the “Alta California” began at once their preparations to get out a cheap paper-covered edition of those contributions. An advance notice in the press despatches sent from California was regarded as a sort of answer to the alleged challenge of Mark Twain and his publishers. This sent the perplexed author hurrying back to San Francisco in quest of an ascertainment of his real rights in his own letters. Amicable counsels prevailed. The cheap San Francisco edition of the book was abandoned, and Mark Twain was allowed to take possession of his undoubted copyright, and his book of letters, entitled “The Innocents Abroad,” was published in the latter part of that year—1868. (Brooks 1898, 99)
remark attributed to Disraeli . . . statistics.”] This remark was first attributed to British statesman and author Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) in the London Times on 27 July 1895. Although the quip appeared in print as early as 1892, it has not been traced with certainty to Disraeli. For a full discussion, see Shapiro 2006, 208.
[Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Bailey Aldrich]
Source documents.
TS Jean (lost) Typescript made in 1904 by Jean Clemens in Florence from Isabel Lyon’s handwritten record of Clemens’s dictation; now lost.TS2 (lost) Typescript, leaves conjecturally numbered 81–85, made from TS Jean; now lost.
TS3 Typescript, leaves numbered 16–20, probably made from TS Jean, and revised.
TS4 Typescript, leaves numbered 79–83, made from TS Jean.
NAR 2pf Galley proofs of NAR 2, typeset from the revised TS3 and further revised, ViU.
NAR 2 North American Review 183 (21 September 1906), 456–59.
The original source of the text is now lost; it was a typescript prepared in 1904 in Florence by Jean Clemens, who transcribed the longhand notes taken by Isabel Lyon from Clemens’s dictation. During his visit to Dublin in August 1906, Harvey selected material for the first five installments of the NAR, and Hobby was instructed to prepare a typescript, TS3, to serve as printer’s copy (see Contents and Pagination of TS3, Batch 1). TS2 (also lost), TS3, and TS4 must have all derived from the 1904 typescript, which also served as the source of another excerpt included in NAR 2 (the first half of “Scraps from My Autobiography. From Chapter IX”). TS3 agrees with TS4 in all of its substantive readings; although TS4 has less authority than TS3—which Clemens revised—its variants are reported, because it may incorporate authorial readings not present in TS3. Only one of its readings has been adopted (‘equaled’ at 229.14). When TS3 and TS4 agree, they confirm the readings of the missing TS Jean.
Clemens made a few additional corrections on NAR 2pf. An unidentified NAR editor wrote ‘Stevenson’, a question mark, and ‘IV’ on the first page of TS3, indicating its section number in NAR 2, the others being the first part of “Scraps from My Autobiography. From Chapter IX” and material from the ADs of 3 April and 21 May 1906.
ButⒶapparatus note it was on a bench in Washington Square that I saw the most of Louis StevensonⒺexplanatory note. It was an outing that lasted an hour or moreⒶapparatus note and was very pleasant and sociable. I had come with him from his house,Ⓐapparatus note where I had been paying my respects to his family. His business in the Square was to absorb the sunshine. He was most scantily furnished with flesh, his clothes seemed to fall into hollows as if there might be nothing inside but the frame for a sculptor’s statue. His long face and lank hair and dark complexion and musing and melancholy expression seemed [begin page 229] to fit these details justly and harmoniously, and the altogether of it seemed especially planned to gather the raysⒶapparatus note of your observation and focalize them upon Stevenson’s special distinction and commanding feature, his splendid eyes. They burned with a smouldering rich fire under the pent-houseⒶapparatus note of his brows, and they made him beautiful.
* * * * * * *Ⓐapparatus note
IⒶapparatus note said I thought he was right about the othersⒺexplanatory note, but mistaken as to Bret Harte; in substance I said that Harte was good company and a thin but pleasant talkerⒺexplanatory note; that he was always bright, but never brilliant; that in this matter he must not be classed with Thomas Bailey AldrichⒺexplanatory note, nor must any other man, ancient or modern; that Aldrich was always witty, always brilliant, if there was anybody present capable of striking his flint at the right angle; that Aldrich was as sure and prompt and unfailing as the red hotⒶapparatus note iron on the blacksmith’s anvil—youⒶapparatus note had only to hit it competently to make it deliver an explosion of sparks. I added—
“Aldrich has never had his peer for prompt and pithy and witty and humorous sayings. None has equaledⒶapparatus note him, certainly none has surpassed him, in the felicity of phrasing with which he clothed these children of his fancy. Aldrich was always brilliant, he couldn’t help it, he is a fire-opal set round with rose diamonds; when he is not speaking,Ⓐapparatus note you know that his dainty fancies are twinkling and glimmering around in him; when he speaks the diamonds flash. Yes, he was always brilliant, he will always be brilliant; he will be brilliant in hell—you will see.”
Stevenson, smiling a chuckly smile, “I hope not.”
“Well, you will, and he will dim even those ruddy fires and look like a transfigured AdonisⒶapparatus note backed against a pink sunset.”
* * * * * * *Ⓐapparatus note
There on that bench we struck out a new phrase—oneⒶapparatus note or the other of us, I don’t remember which—“submerged renown.” Variations were discussed:Ⓐapparatus note “submerged fame,”Ⓐapparatus note “submerged reputation,”Ⓐapparatus note and so on, and a choice was made; “submerged renown”Ⓐapparatus note was elected, I believe. This important matter rose out of an incident which had been happening to Stevenson in Albany. While in a book shop or book stallⒶapparatus note there he had noticed a long rank of small booksⒶapparatus note cheaply but neatly gotten up, and bearing such titles as “Davis’s Selected Speeches,” “Davis’s Selected Poetry,” Davis’s this and Davis’s that and Davis’s the other thing; compilations,Ⓐapparatus note every one of them, each with a brief, compact, intelligent and useful introductory chapter by this same Davis, whose first name I have forgottenⒺexplanatory note. Stevenson had begun the matter with this question:
“Can you name the American author whose fame and acceptance stretch widestⒶapparatus note in the States?”
I thought I could, but it did not seem to me that it would be modest to speak out, in the circumstances. So I diffidently said nothing. Stevenson noticed, and said—
“Save your delicacy for another time—youⒶapparatus note are not the one. For a shilling you can’t name the American author of widest note and popularity in the StatesⒶapparatus note. But I can.”
Then he went on and told about that Albany incident. He had inquired of the shopman—
“WhoⒶapparatus note is this Davis?”
The answer was—
[begin page 230]“An author whose books have to have freight trains to carry them, not baskets. Apparently you have not heard of him?”
Stevenson said no, this was the first time. The man said—
“Nobody has heard of Davis; you may ask all aroundⒶapparatus note and you will see. You never see his name mentioned in print, not even in advertisementsⒶapparatus note; these things are of no use to Davis, not any more than they are to the wind and the sea. You never see one of Davis’s books floating on top of the United States, but put on your diving armor and get yourself lowered away down and down and down till you strike the dense region, the sunless region of eternal drudgery and starvation wages—there you’llⒶapparatus note find them by the million. The man that gets that market, his fortune is made, his bread and butter are safe, for those people will never go back on him. An author may have a reputation which is confined to the surface, and lose it and become pitied, then despised, then forgotten, entirely forgotten—the frequent steps in a surface reputation. A surface reputation, however great, is always mortal, and always killable if you go at it right—withⒶapparatus note pins and needles, and quiet slow poison, not with the club and the tomahawkⒶapparatus note. But it is a different matter with the submerged reputation—down in the deep water; once a favorite there, always a favorite; once beloved, always beloved; once respected, always respected, honored, and believed in. For, what the reviewer says never finds its way down into those placid deeps; nor the newspaper sneers, nor any breath of the winds of slander blowing above. Down there they never hear of these things. Their idol may be painted clay, up there at the surface, and fade and waste and crumble and blow away, there being much weather there; but down below he is gold and adamant and indestructible.”Ⓐapparatus note
Louis Stevenson] Clemens met Stevenson (1850–94) in April 1888. Ill with lung disease, Stevenson had spent the winter with his wife and stepson at a well-known health resort at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. He wrote to Clemens on 13 April, proposing that they meet in New York City, where he planned to stay from 19 to 26 April. Clemens, an admirer of Treasure Island and Kidnapped, was pleased when Stevenson wrote him that he had read Huckleberry Finn “four times, and am quite ready to begin again tomorrow” (13? Apr 1888, CU-MARK). Later in the year Stevenson left on a Pacific cruise, spending the rest of his life on various islands in the South Seas (15 and 17 Apr 1888 to Stevenson, CLjC; Baetzhold 1970, 203–6).
I said that I thought he was right about the others] The “others” were presumably mentioned in the portion of the text that Clemens omitted, signaled by the line of asterisks. Another omission occurs below (at 229.22). The two gaps may have been part of the original 1904 typescript (now lost), but it is more likely that they were the result of Clemens’s revisions before it was retyped in 1906.
Harte was good company and a thin but pleasant talker] See “Ralph Keeler,” note at 150.2–4. Clemens’s friendship with Harte had ended acrimoniously in 1877 with the failure of Ah Sin, the play on which they collaborated. In a later dictation Clemens explained that Harte’s character spoiled his “sharp wit,” which “consisted solely of sneers and sarcasms; when there was nothing to sneer at, Harte did not flash and sparkle” (AD, 4 Feb 1907; N&J3, 2).
Thomas Bailey Aldrich] Aldrich (1836–1907), an immensely popular poet and novelist and a pillar of the New England literary establishment, grew up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which served as the setting for many of his literary works. In 1852, lacking the funds to attend Harvard, he moved to New York City to work as a clerk in his uncle’s business. He soon began to publish poems, and joined the editorial staffs of several journals. During 1861–62 he was a Civil War correspondent for the New York Tribune. He married Lilian Woodman in 1865 and moved to Boston, where in 1866 he became editor of the literary magazine Every Saturday, a post he held through 1874. He succeeded William Dean Howells as editor of the Atlantic Monthly in 1881, a position he retained until 1890. Clemens first met Aldrich, after some months’ correspondence, in November 1871, and the two enjoyed a lifelong friendship. Among Clemens’s tributes to Aldrich as a conversationalist is a remark recorded by Paine: “When Aldrich speaks it seems to me he is the bright face of the moon, and I feel like the other side” ( MTB, 2:642 n. 1; 15 Jan 1871 to the Editor of Every Saturday, L4, 304 n. 1).
“Davis’s Selected Speeches,” . . . I have forgotten] No such series of books by “Davis” has been found. Possibly Stevenson (or Clemens) misremembered the name of William Brisbane Dick (1826–1901), coproprietor of Dick and Fitzgerald, a publishing firm founded in 1858. Compilations of prose and poetry, as well as books for entertainment or self-improvement, bulked large in their catalog, which included Dick’s Recitations and Readings, American Card Player, Dick’s Comic Dialogues, Dick’s Irish Dialect Recitations, Dick’s Art of Wrestling, and Dick’s Society Letter-Writer for Ladies, all issued between 1866 and 1887. In 1867 Clemens himself had considered offering the publishers a collection of his Sacramento Union letters from the Sandwich Islands (Cox 2000, 85–86; N&J1, 176–77 n. 166).
[Villa di Quarto]
Source documents.
TS Jean (incomplete) Typescript, leaves numbered 1–21, made in 1904 by Jean Clemens in Florence from Isabel Lyon’s handwritten record of Clemens’s dictation, and revised: ‘January . . . Providence.” ’ (230.22–237.8). TS Jean ends in the middle of a sentence; the rest of it is now lost.MS Untitled manuscript of 33 leaves, written in 1893–94: ‘When we . . . for talk.’ (224.35–249.44).
TS Hobby Typescript, leaves numbered D. 1–45, made by Hobby from the lost portion of TS Jean and the MS, and revised: ‘To get . . . for talk.’ (237.9–249.44).
Paine supplied the title “Villa di Quarto” when he published this dictation in MTA . TS Jean is the source for the first portion of the text, and TS Hobby, presumably made from the now-lost part of TS Jean, is the source for the second portion. The two typescripts do not overlap, and TS Jean is clearly incomplete, so there may have been additional text that is now lost. The last portion of the text, a description of the Villa Viviani (where the Clemenses stayed during an earlier sojourn in Florence), is based on the MS. Clemens noted at the end of his dictated comments that he would include ‘some extracts’ from ‘old manuscripts and random and spasmodic diaries’ (244.32–34). The MS was written in black ink on torn half sheets of white laid paper, measuring 5 by 8 inches, which Clemens used in 1893 and 1894. Although most of the MS revisions are in ink, several were added later in pencil, probably in 1906; they are identified below. TS Hobby includes a highly accurate transcription of the MS: it agrees with the MS in all of its substantive readings, differing only in its spelled-out numbers and the like. The MS text is adopted here, and the derivative (nonauthorial) readings in this portion of TS Hobby are not reported.
Clemens revised only the first fifteen pages of TS Hobby; on page 8 he wrote a note to himself, ‘By & by, examine page 28 & beyond.’—an indication that he planned to review the Villa Viviani portion of the text at a later date (the MS transcription begins on page 27). He never revised the text on any extant document. Hobby apparently transcribed all or nearly all of “Villa di Quarto” into TS2, but the pages on which it presumably occurred (86–144) are now missing.
TS Jean contains a large number of mistyped words, and its punctuation often does not reflect Clemens’s typical style. Although he revised the typescript, for the most part he merely corrected typing errors, added hyphens to compound words, and made other trivial changes. He overlooked a large number of errors, however, often failing to correct glaring mistypings while making other more subtle changes. He was inconsistent, for example, in adding an umlaut to ‘Würtemberg’ (more commonly spelled ‘Württemberg’), correcting possessives such as ‘Countess’s’, and substituting prose numbers for numerals. Clemens also revised the first fifteen pages of TS Hobby, again somewhat carelessly. The author’s manuscript usage has served as a guide to correct manifestly defective punctuation and inconsistent spelling in both TS Jean and TS Hobby. In particular, in passages that Clemens did not revise, commas were added in appositional clauses such as ‘her head servant, the steward of the estate,’ (233.11). Although all of his revisions are reported, Jean’s self-corrections on the typewriter, as well as a few errors that she corrected in pencil, have not been listed.
Between May and July 1906 Clemens considered publishing an excerpt from this sketch in Samuel McClure’s newspaper syndicate. At the top of TS Jean he wrote his calculation of the word count, ‘Mc (about 4,000) 3,000)—or 4000’ (see the Introduction, p. 29), and on page 8 of TS Hobby he wrote the instruction ‘stop here.’ after ‘satisfactory.’ (239.3), indicating that the excerpt was to include all of the text in TS Jean and end on page 8 of TS Hobby. He marked many passages for suppression, noting on the back of the second page of TS Jean, ‘Leave out that blue-penciled passage (& all blue-penciled passages in the first edition. Restore them in later editions. SLC’. He then circled the text he wanted to omit in the same blue pencil, and in some cases inserted an alternative wording in ink—suppressing the countess’s name, for example, and referring instead to an ‘American owner of the house’ (see the entry for ‘come . . . sex.’ at 231.13–14). All of these passages are identified, and their associated alternative readings, if any, are reported.
Typed on page 15 of TS Hobby is the instruction ‘Here Insert Rhone Voyage—Pages 15–a. b. c., etc.’, a reference to an unfinished manuscript entitled “The Innocents Adrift” (see the Explanatory Note at 241.9). There is no indication that Clemens followed through on his intention.
JanuaryⒺexplanatory note. 1904.
This villa is situated three or four miles from Florence, and has several names. Some call it the Villa Reale di QuartoⒺexplanatory note, some call it the Villa Principessa, some call it the Villa Granduchessa;Ⓐapparatus note this multiplicity of names was an inconvenience to me for the first two or three weeks, for as I had heard the place called by only one name, when letters came for the servants directed to the care of one or the other of the other names, I supposed a mistake had been made and remailed them. It has been explained to me that there is reason for these several names. Its name Quarto it gets from the district which it is in, itⒶapparatus note being in the four-mileⒶapparatus note radius from the centre of Florence. It is called Reale because the King of WürtembergⒶapparatus note Ⓔexplanatory note occupied it at one time;Ⓐapparatus note Principessa and Granduchessa because a Russian daughter ofⒶapparatus note the imperialⒶapparatus note houseⒺexplanatory note occupied it at another. There is a history of the house somewhere, and some timeⒶapparatus note or other I shall get it and see if there are any details in it which could be of useⒶapparatus note in this chapter. I should like to see that book, for as an evolutionist I should like to know the beginning of this dwelling and the several stages of its evolution. Baedeker says it was built by Cosimo I, by [ ], architectⒶapparatus note Ⓔexplanatory note. I have learned this within the past three minutes, and it wrecks my development scheme. I was surmising that the house began in a small and humble way, and was the production of a poorⒶapparatus note farmer whose idea of home and comfort it was; thatⒶapparatus note following him a generation or two later [begin page 231] came a successor of better rank and larger means who built an addition; that successor after successor added more bricks and more bulk as time dragged on, each in his turn leaving a detail behind him of paint or wall-paper to distinguish his reign from the others; that finally in the last century came the three that precede me,Ⓐapparatus note and added their specialties. The King of WürtembergⒶapparatus note broke out room enough in the centre of the building—Ⓐapparatus noteabout a hundred feet from each end of it,—Ⓐapparatus noteto put in the great staircase, a cheapⒶapparatus note and showy affair,Ⓐapparatus note almost the only wooden thing in the whole edifice,Ⓐapparatus note and as comfortable and sane and satisfactory as it is out of character with the rest of the asylum. The Russian Princess,Ⓐapparatus note who came with native superstitions about cold weather,Ⓐapparatus note added the hot-airⒶapparatus note furnaces in the cellar and the vast greenⒶapparatus note majolica stove in the great hall where the King’s staircase is—Ⓐapparatus notea stove which I thought might possibly be a church—a nurseryⒶapparatus note church for children, so imposing is it for size and so richly adorned with basso relievos of an ultra pious sort.Ⓐapparatus note It is loaded and fired from a secret place behind the partition against which it is backed. LastⒶapparatus note of all came Satan also, the Countess MassigliaⒺexplanatory note, present owner of the house, an American product, and male in everything but sex.Ⓐapparatus note She added a cheap and stingy arrangement of electric bells, inadequate acetylene-gasⒶapparatus note plant, obsolete water closetsⒶapparatus note, perhaps a dozen pieces of machine-madeⒶapparatus note boarding-houseⒶapparatus note furniture, and some fire-auctionⒶapparatus note carpets which blasphemeⒶapparatus note the standards of color and artⒶapparatus note all day long, and never quiet down until the darkness comes and pacifies them.
However, if the house was built for Cosimo four hundred years ago and with an architect on deck, I suppose I must dismiss those notions about the gradual growth of the house in bulk. Cosimo would want a large house, he would want to build it himself so that he could have it just the way he wanted it. I think he had his will. In the architectureⒶapparatus note of this barrack there has been no development. There was no architectureⒶapparatus note in the first place and none has been added, except the King’s meretricious staircase, the Princess’sⒶapparatus note ecclesiastical stove, and the Countess’sⒶapparatus note obsolete water closetsⒶapparatus note. I am speaking of art-architecture;Ⓐapparatus note there is none.
There is no more architecture of that breedⒶapparatus note discoverable in this long stretch of ugly and ornamentless three-storiedⒶapparatus note house-front than there is about a rope walkⒶapparatus note or a bowling alley. The shape and proportions of the house suggest those things, it being two hundredⒶapparatus note feet long by sixty wide. There is no art-architectureⒶapparatus note inside the house, there is none outside.
We arrive now at practicalⒶapparatus note architecture—theⒶapparatus note useful, the indispensable, which plans the inside of a house and by wisely placing and distributing the rooms, or by stupidlyⒶapparatus note and ineffectually distributing them, makes the house a convenientⒶapparatus note and comfortable and satisfactory abiding place or the reverse. The inside of the house is evidence that Cosimo’s architect was not in his right mind. And it seems to me that it is not fair and not kind in Baedeker to keep on exposing his name and his crime down to this late date. I am nobler than Baedeker, and more humane, and I suppress it. I don’t remember what it was, anyway.Ⓐapparatus note
I shall go into the details of this house, not because I imagine it differs much from any other old-timeⒶapparatus note palace or new-timeⒶapparatus note palace on the continent of EuropeⒶapparatus note, but because every one of its crazy details interests me, and therefore may be expected to interest others of the human race, particularly women. When they readⒶapparatus note novels they usually skip the weather, but I have noticed that they read with avidity all that a writer says about the furnishings, decorations, conveniences, and general style of a home.
[begin page 232]The interior of this barrack is so chopped up and systemless that one cannot deal in exact numbers when trying to put its choppings-upⒶapparatus note into statistics.
In the basement or cellar there are as follows:
Stalls and boxes for many horses—right under the principal bed-chamber. The horses noisily dance to the solicitations of the multitudinous flies all night.Ⓐapparatus note
Feed-stores.
Carriage-house.
Acetylene-gas plant.
A vast kitchen. Put out of use years ago.Ⓐapparatus note
Another kitchen.
Coal-rooms.
Coke-rooms.
Peat-rooms.
Wood-rooms.
ThreeⒶapparatus note furnaces.
Wine-rooms.Ⓐapparatus note
Various store-rooms for all sorts of domestic supplies.
Lot of vacant and unclassified rooms.
Labyrinth of corridors and passages, affording the stranger an absolute certainty of getting lost.
A vast cesspool! It is cleaned out every thirty years.Ⓐapparatus note
Couple of dark stairways leading up to the ground floor.
AboutⒶapparatus note twentyⒶapparatus note divisions as I count them.
This cellar seems to be of the full dimension of the house’s foundations—say two hundredⒶapparatus note feet by sixtyⒶapparatus note.
The ground floor,Ⓐapparatus note where I am dictating—is cut up into twenty-three rooms, halls, corridors, and so forth. The next floor above contains eighteenⒶapparatus note divisions of the like sort, one of which is the billiard room and another the great drawing-room.
The top story consists of twentyⒶapparatus note bedroomsⒶapparatus note and a furnace. Large rooms they necessarily are, for they are arranged ten on a side, and they occupy that whole space of two hundredⒶapparatus note feet long by sixtyⒶapparatus note wide, except that there is a liberal passage or hallwayⒶapparatus note between them. There are good fireplacesⒶapparatus note up there, and they would make charming bed-chambersⒶapparatus note if handsomely and comfortably furnished and decorated. But there would need to be a lift—Ⓐapparatus notenot a EuropeanⒶapparatus note lift, with its mere stand-up space, and its imperceptible movement, but a roomy and swift American one.
TheseⒶapparatus note rooms are reached now by the same process by which they were reached in Cosimo’s time—by leg power. TheirⒶapparatus note brick floors are bare and unpainted, their walls are bare, and painted the favorite European color,Ⓐapparatus note which is now and always has been an odious stomach-turning yellow. It is said that theseⒶapparatus note rooms were intended for servants only and that they were meant to accommodate two or threeⒶapparatus note servants apiece. It seems certain that they have not been occupied by any but servants in the last fifty or a hundredⒶapparatus note years, otherwise they would exhibit some remains of decoration.
If then theyⒶapparatus note have always been for the use of servants only, where did Cosimo and his family [begin page 233] sleep? Where did the King of WürtembergⒶapparatus note bestow his dear ones? For below that floor there are not any more than three good bed-chambersⒶapparatus note and five devilish ones. WithⒶapparatus note eightyⒶapparatus note cut-ups in the house and with but four persons in my family,Ⓐapparatus note this large fact is provable:Ⓐapparatus note that we can’t invite a friend to come and stay a few days with us,Ⓐapparatus note because there is not a bedroomⒶapparatus note unoccupied by ourselves that we could offer him without apologies. In fact we have no friend whom we love so little and respect so moderately as to be willing to stuff him into one of those vacant cells.
Yes—Ⓐapparatus note whereⒶapparatus note did the vanished aristocracy sleep? I mean the real aristocracy, not the American CountessⒶapparatus note, for she required no room to speak of. When we arrived her husband was far away in the Orient serving his country in a diplomatic capacity, the Countess’sⒶapparatus note mother had gone home to America and the Countess was keeping solitary and unvisited stateⒶapparatus note in this big mansion with her head servant,Ⓐapparatus note the steward of the estate,Ⓐapparatus note as society and protector.Ⓐapparatus note To go on with my details:Ⓐapparatus note this little room where I am dictating these informations on this 8th day of January 1904, is on the eastⒶapparatus note side of the house. It is level with the ground and one may step from its nine- or ten-foot-highⒶapparatus note vast door into the terrace garden,Ⓐapparatus note which is a great square level space surrounded by an ornamental iron railing with vases of flowers distributed here and there along its top. It is a pretty terrace with abundant green grass, with handsome trees, with a great fountain in the middle, and with roses of various tints nodding in the balmy air, and flashing back the rays of the JanuaryⒶapparatus note sun. Beyond the railing to the eastward stretches the private park, and through its trees curves the road to the far-offⒶapparatus note iron gate on the public road, where there is neither porter nor porter’s lodge nor any wayⒶapparatus note to communicate with the mansion.Ⓐapparatus note Yet from time immemorial the Italian villa has been a fortress hermetically sealed up in high walls of masonry and with entrance guarded by locked iron gates. The gates of Italy have always been locked at nightfallⒶapparatus note and kept locked the night through. No Italian trusted his contadiniⒺexplanatory note neighbors in the old times, and his successor does not trust them now. There are bells and porters for the convenience of outsidersⒶapparatus note desiring to get in at other villas, but it is not the case with this one, and apparently never has been. Surely it must have happened now and then that these Kings and nobilities got caught out after the gates were locked. Then how did they get in? We shall never know. The question cannot be answered. It must take its place with the other unsolved mystery of where the aristocracyⒶapparatus note slept during those centuries when they occupied this fortress.
To return to that glass door. OutsideⒶapparatus note it are exceedinglyⒶapparatus note heavy and coarse VenetianⒶapparatus note shutters, aⒶapparatus note fairly good defence against a catapult.
These,Ⓐapparatus note like the leaves of the glass door,Ⓐapparatus note swing open in the French fashion, and I will remark in passing that to my mind the French window is as rational and convenient as the English-American window is the reverse of this. Inside the glass door (three or fourⒶapparatus note inches inside of it) are solid doorsⒶapparatus note made of boards, good and strong and ugly. The shutters, the glass door and theseⒶapparatus note wooden-doorⒶapparatus note defencesⒶapparatus note against intrusion of light and thieves are all armed with strong and heavy bolts which are shot up and down by the turning of a handle. The house-wallsⒶapparatus note being very thick,Ⓐapparatus note these doors and shutters and things do not crowd each other, there is plenty of space between them, andⒶapparatus note there is room for more in case we should get to feeling afraid. This shuttered glass door, this convenient exit to the terrace and garden,Ⓐapparatus note is not the only one on this side of the house from which one can as handily step upon the terrace. There is a procession of them [begin page 234] stretching along,Ⓐapparatus note door after door, along the eastⒶapparatus note or rear front of the house, from its southernⒶapparatus note end to its northernⒶapparatus note end—eleven in the procession. Beginning at the southⒶapparatus note end they afford exit from a parlor; a large bedroom, (mine);Ⓐapparatus note this little twelve by twentyⒶapparatus note reception room where I am now at work; andⒶapparatus note a ten by twelveⒶapparatus note ditto, whichⒶapparatus note is in effect the beginning of a corridor fortyⒶapparatus note feetⒶapparatus note long by twelveⒶapparatus note wide with three sets of triple glass doorsⒶapparatus note for exit to the terrace. The corridorⒶapparatus note empties into a dining room,Ⓐapparatus note and the dining room into twoⒶapparatus note large rooms beyond, all with glass-doorⒶapparatus note exits to the terrace. When the doors which connect these sevenⒶapparatus note rooms and the corridor are thrown open the two-hundred-footⒶapparatus note stretch of variegated carpeting with its warring and shouting and blaspheming tumult of color makes a fine and almost contenting recedingⒶapparatus note and diminishing perspectiveⒶapparatus note, and one realizes that if some sane person could have the privilege and the opportunity of burning the existing carpets and instituting harmonies of color in their place the reformed perspective would be very beautiful. Above each of the elevenⒶapparatus note glass doors is a duplicate on the next floor. Ten feet by six,Ⓐapparatus note of glass. And above each of these on the topmostⒶapparatus note floor is a smaller window—thirty-threeⒶapparatus note good openings for light on this easternⒶapparatus note front, the same on the western front, and nine of ampler size on each end of the house. Fifty-sixⒶapparatus note of these eighty-fourⒶapparatus note windows contain double enough glassⒶapparatus note to equip the average window of an American dwelling, yet the house is by no means correspondingly light. I do not know why, perhaps it is because of the dismal upholstering of the walls.
VillaⒶapparatus note di Quarto is a palaceⒶapparatus note; Cosimo built it for that, his architect intended it for that, it has always been regarded as a palace, and an old resident of Florence told me the other day that it was a good average sample of the Italian palace of the great nobility, and thatⒶapparatus note its grotesqueness and barbarities, incongruities and destitution of conveniences are to be found in the rest. I am able to believe this because I have seen some of the others.
I think there is not a room in this huge confusionⒶapparatus note of rooms and halls and corridors and cells and waste spaces which does not contain some memento of each of its illustrious occupants, or at least two or three of them.
We will examine the parlor at the head of that long perspective which I have been describing. The arched ceiling is beautiful both in shape and decoration. It is finely and elaborately frescoed. The ceiling is a memento of Cosimo. The doors are draped with heavy pale blue silk, faintlyⒶapparatus note figured, that is the KingⒶapparatus note of Würtemberg’sⒶapparatus note relic. TheⒶapparatus note gleaming white brass-banded porcelain pagoda which contains an open fireplaceⒶapparatus note for wood is a relic of the Russian Princess and a remembrancer of her native experiences of cold weather. The light gray wall-paperⒶapparatus note figured with gold flowers is anybody’s—Ⓐapparatus notewe care not to guess its pedigreeⒶapparatus note. TheⒶapparatus note rest of the room is manifestly a result of the Countess Massiglia’sⒶapparatus note occupation. Its shouting inharmonies and disorders manifestly had their origin in her chaoticⒶapparatus note mind. The floor is covered with a felt-like filling of strenuous red, one can almost see Pharaoh’s host floundering in it. There are four rugs scattered about like islands, violent rugs whose colors swear at each other and at the Red SeaⒶapparatus note. There is a sofa upholstered in a coarse material, a frenzyⒶapparatus note of green and blue and blood,Ⓐapparatus note a cheap and undeceptive imitation of Florentine embroidery. ThereⒶapparatus note is a sofa and two chairsⒶapparatus note upholstered in pale green silk,Ⓐapparatus note figured, the wood is of three different breeds of American walnut, flimsy, cheap, machine-made. ThereⒶapparatus note is a French-walnutⒶapparatus note sofa upholstered in figured silkⒶapparatus note of a fiendish crushed-strawberryⒶapparatus note tint of a faded aspect, andⒶapparatus note there is an arm-chairⒶapparatus note which is a mate to it. ThereⒶapparatus note is a plain and naked black [begin page 235] walnut table without a cover to modify its nudity;Ⓐapparatus note under it is a large round ottoman covered with the palest of pale green silk, a sort of glorified mushroom which curses with all its might at the Red SeaⒶapparatus note and the furious rugs and the crushed-strawberryⒶapparatus note relics. Against the wall stands a tall glass-frontedⒶapparatus note bookcase, machine-made—Ⓐapparatus notethe material, American butternut. It stands near enough to the King of Würtemberg’sⒶapparatus note heavy silken door-draperyⒶapparatus note to powerfully accent its cheapness and ugliness by contrast. Upon the wallsⒶapparatus note hang threeⒶapparatus note good water-colorsⒶapparatus note, six or eightⒶapparatus note very bad ones, a pious-lookingⒶapparatus note portrait of the CountessⒶapparatus note in bridal veil and low neck, and a number of photographs of members of her tribe. One of them is a picture of the Count, who has a manly and intelligent face and looks like a gentleman. What possessed him to become proprietor of the Countess he probably could not explain at this late day himself.Ⓐapparatus note
The whole literature of this vast house is contained in that fire-auctionⒶapparatus note American bookcase. There are four shelves. The topⒶapparatus note one is made up of indiscriminate literature of good quality; theⒶapparatus note next shelf is made up of cloth-coveredⒶapparatus note books devoted to Christian Science and spiritualism—Ⓐapparatus note fortyⒶapparatus note thin books; theⒶapparatus note two remaining shelves contain fifty-fourⒶapparatus note bound volumes of BlackwoodⒺexplanatory note, in date running backward from about 1870.Ⓐapparatus note This bookcase and its contents were probably imported from America by the Countess’s mother, who tore herself away some months ago and returned to Philadelphia. One cannot attribute the Blackwoods to the Countess, they contain nothing that could interest her. It is most unlikely that the religious shelf could enlist her sympathies, her moral constitution being made up of envy, hate, malice and treachery. She is easily the most fiendish character I have ever encountered in any walk of life.Ⓐapparatus note
The room just described must be dignified with that imposing title, library,Ⓐapparatus note on account of the presence in it of that butternutⒶapparatus note bookcase and its indigent contents. It does duty, now,Ⓐapparatus note as a private parlor for Mrs. Clemens during those brief and widely separated occasions when she is permitted to leave for an hour the bed to which she has been so long condemned. We are in the extreme south end of the house, if there is any such thing as a south end to a house, where orientation cannot be determined by me, because I am incompetent in all cases where an object does not point directly north or south. This one slants across between, and is therefore a confusion to me.Ⓐapparatus note This little private parlor is in one of the two corners of what I callⒶapparatus note the southⒶapparatus note end of the house. The sun rises in such a way that all the morning it is pouring its light in through the thirty-threeⒶapparatus note glass doors or windows which pierce the side of the house which looks upon the terrace and garden, as already described;Ⓐapparatus note the rest of the day the light floods this southⒶapparatus note end of the house, as I call it;Ⓐapparatus note at noon the sun is directly above Florence yonder in theⒶapparatus note distance in the plain—Ⓐapparatus notedirectly above those architectural features which have been so familiar to the world in pictures for some centuries:Ⓐapparatus note the Duomo, the Campanile, the Tomb of the Medici and the beautiful tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; above Florence, but not very high aboveⒶapparatus note it, for it never climbs quite half way to the zenith in these winter days; in this position it begins to reveal the secrets of the delicious blue mountains that circle around into the westⒶapparatus note, for its light discovers, uncovers, and exposes a white snow-stormⒶapparatus note of villas and cities that you cannot train yourself to have confidence in, they appear and disappear so mysteriously and so as if they might be not villas and cities at all but the ghosts of perished ones of the remote and dim Etruscan times; and late in the afternoon the sun sinksⒶapparatus note down behind those mountains somewhere, at no particular time and at no particular place,Ⓐapparatus note so far as I can see.
[begin page 236]This “library,” or boudoir, orⒶapparatus note private parlor opens into Mrs. Clemens’sⒶapparatus note bedroomⒶapparatus note, and it andⒶapparatus note the bedroomⒶapparatus note together stretch all the way across the southⒶapparatus note end of the houseⒶapparatus note. The bedroomⒶapparatus note gets the sun before noon,Ⓐapparatus note and is prodigally drenched and deluged with it the rest of the day. One of its windows is particularly well calculated to let in a liberal supply of sunshine,Ⓐapparatus note for it contains twelveⒶapparatus note great panes, each of them more than twoⒶapparatus note feet square. The bedroom is thirty-oneⒶapparatus note feet long by twenty-fourⒶapparatus note wide, and there has been a time when it and the “library”Ⓐapparatus note had no partition between,Ⓐapparatus note but occupied the whole breadthⒶapparatus note of the southⒶapparatus note end of the house in an unbroken stretch. It must have been a ball-roomⒶapparatus note or banqueting room at that time. I suggest this merely because perhaps not even Cosimo would need so much bedroom, whereas it would do very well indeed as a banquetingⒶapparatus note room because of its proximity to the cooking arrangements,Ⓐapparatus note which were not more than two or three hundred yards away,Ⓐapparatus note downⒶapparatus note cellar, a very eligible condition of things indeed in the old times. Monarchs cannot have the conveniences which we plebeiansⒶapparatus note are privileged to luxuriate in—they can’t,Ⓐapparatus note even to-day. If I were invited to spend a week in Windsor Castle it would gladden me and make me feel proud; but if there was any hint about regular boarders I should let on that I didn’t hear. As a palace Windsor Castle is great; great for show, spaciousness, display, grandeur, and all that;Ⓐapparatus note but the bedrooms are small, uninviting and inconvenient, and the arrangements for delivering food from the kitchen to the table are so clumsy, and wasteⒶapparatus note so much time that a meal there probably suggests recent cold storage. This is only conjecture; I did not eat there. In Windsor Castle the courses are brought upⒶapparatus note by dumb waiter from the profound depth where the vast kitchen is, they are then transferred by rail on a narrow little tramway to the territory where the dinner is to have place. This trolley was stillⒶapparatus note being worked by hand when I was there four years ago;Ⓐapparatus note still it was without doubt a great advance upon Windsor Castle transportation of any age before Queen Victoria’s. It is startling to reflect that whatⒶapparatus note we call conveniences in a dwelling-houseⒶapparatus note, and which we regard as necessities, were born so recently that hardly one of them existed in the world when Queen Victoria was born. The valuable part—to myⒶapparatus note thinking the valuable part—Ⓐapparatus noteof what we call civilization had no existence when she emerged upon the planet.Ⓐapparatus note She sat in her chair in that venerable fortress andⒶapparatus note saw it grow from its mustard seed to theⒶapparatus note stupendousⒶapparatus note tree which it had become before she died. She saw the whole of the new creation, she saw everything that was made, and without her witness was not anything made that was madeⒺexplanatory note. A very creditable creation indeed, takingⒶapparatus note all things into account; sinceⒶapparatus note man, quite unassisted, did it all out of his own head. I jump to this conclusion because I think that if ProvidenceⒶapparatus note had been minded to help him, it would have occurred to Providence to do this some hundred thousand centuries earlier. We are accustomed to seeing the hand of ProvidenceⒶapparatus note in everything. Accustomed because if we missed it,Ⓐapparatus note or thought we missed it,Ⓐapparatus note we had discretion enough not to let on. We are a tactful race. We have been prompt to give Providence the credit of this fine and showy new civilization and we have been quite intemperateⒶapparatus note in our praises of this great benefaction; we have not been able to keep still over this splendid five-minuteⒶapparatus note attention, we can only keep still about the agesⒶapparatus note of neglect which preceded it and which it makes so conspicuous. When Providence washes one of his worms into the sea in a tempest, then starves him and freezes him on a plank for thirty-fourⒶapparatus note days, and finally wrecks him again on an uninhabited island, where he lives on shrimps and grasshoppers and other shell-fishⒶapparatus note for threeⒶapparatus note months, and is at last rescued by some old whisky-soaked profane and blasphemous [begin page 237] infidel of a tramp captain, and carried home gratis to his friends, the worm forgets that it was Providence that washed him overboard, and only remembers that Providence rescued him. He finds no fault, he has no sarcasms for Providence’s crude and slow and labored ingenuities of inventionⒶapparatus note in the matter of life-savingⒶapparatus note, he sees nothing in these delays and ineffectivenesses but food for admiration, to him they seem a marvel, a miracle;Ⓐapparatus note and the longer they take andⒶapparatus note the more ineffective they are, the greater the miracle; meantime he never allows himself to break out in any good hearty unhandicapped thanks for the tough old shipmaster who really saved him, he damns him with faint praise as “the instrument,” his rescuer “under Providence.”Ⓐapparatus note Ⓐapparatus note
To get to thatⒶapparatus note corner room with its bookcase freighted with twenty dollars’ worth of ancient Blackwood and modern spiritualistic literature, I have passed through—undescribed—aⒶapparatus note room that is my bedroom. Its size is good, its shape is good—thirty feet by twenty-two. Originally it was fifty feet long, stretching from one side of the house to the other, in the true Italian fashion which makes everybody’s bedroom a passagewayⒶapparatus note into the next room—Ⓐapparatus noteKings, nobles, serfs and all; but this American Countess,Ⓐapparatus note the present owner,Ⓐapparatus note cut off twenty feet of the room and reattached ten feet of it to the room as a bath-room,Ⓐapparatus note and devoted the rest to a hallway. This bedroom is lighted by one of those tall glass doors,Ⓐapparatus note already described,Ⓐapparatus note which gives upon the terrace. It is divided across the middle by some polished white pillars as big as my body,Ⓐapparatus note with Doric capitals, supporting a small arch at each end and a long one in the middle; this is indeed grandeur, and is quite imposing. The fireplace is of a good size, is of white marble, and the carvings upon it are of the dainty and graceful sort proper to its age,Ⓐapparatus note which is probably four hundred years. The fireplace and the stately columns are aristocratic, they recognize their kinship, and they smile at each other. That is,Ⓐapparatus note when they are not swearing at the rest of the room’s belongings. The front half of the room is aglare with a paper loud of pattern,Ⓐapparatus note atrocious in color, and cheap beyond the dreams of avarice. The rear half is painted from floor to ceiling a dull,Ⓐapparatus note dead and repulsive yellow. It seems strange that yellow should be the favorite in Europe whereby to undecorate a wall; I have never seen the yellow wall which did not depress me and make me unhappy. The floor of the room is covered with a superannuatedⒶapparatus note nightmare of a carpetⒶapparatus note whose figures are vast and riotous, and whose indignant reds and blacks and yellows quarrel day and night and refuse to be reconciled. There is a door opening into the bath-roomⒶapparatus note, and at that same end of the room is a door opening into a small box of a hall which leads to another convenience. Those two doors strictly follow the law of European dwellings,Ⓐapparatus note whether built for the prince or for the pauper. That is to say they are rude, thin,Ⓐapparatus note cheap planks, flimsy;Ⓐapparatus note the sort of door which in the South the negro attaches to his chicken coop. These doors, like all such doors on the Continent,Ⓐapparatus note have a gimlet handle in place of a door-knob. It wrenches from the socket a bolt which has no springs and which will not return to that socket except upon compulsion. You can’t slam a door like that, it would simply rebound. That gimlet handle catches on any garment that tries to get by; if tearable it tears it; if not tearable it stops the wearer with a suddenness and a violence and an unexpectedness which breaks down all his religious reserves, no matter who he may be.
The bedroomⒶapparatus note has a door on each side of the front end,Ⓐapparatus note so that anybody may tramp through that wants to at any time of the day or night, this being the only way to get to the room beyond, where the precious libraryⒶapparatus note is bookcased.Ⓐapparatus note Furniture: a salmon-coloredⒶapparatus note silk sofa, a salmon-coloredⒶapparatus note [begin page 238] silk chair, a pair of ordinary wooden chairs,Ⓐapparatus note and a stuffed chair whose upholsteryⒶapparatus note is of a species unknown to me but devilish; in the corner,Ⓐapparatus note an ordinary thin-legged kitchen table;Ⓐapparatus note against one wall a wardrobe and a dressing bureau;Ⓐapparatus note on the opposite side a rickety chest of drawers made of white pine painted black, and ornamented with imitation brass handles; brassⒶapparatus note double bedstead. One will concede that this room is not over-embarrassedⒶapparatus note with furniture. The two clapboard doors already spoken of are mercifully concealed by parti-colored hangings of unknown country and origin; the three other doors already mentioned are hooded with long curtains that descend to the floor and are caught apart in the middle to permit the passage of people and light. These curtains have a proud and ostentatious look which deceives no one, it being based upon a hybrid silk with cotton for its chief ingredient. The color is a solid yellow,Ⓐapparatus note and deeper than the yellow of the rearward half of the walls;Ⓐapparatus note and now here is a curious thing:Ⓐapparatus note one may look from one of these colors to the other fifty times and each time he will think that the one he is looking at is the ugliest. It is a most curious and interesting effect. I think that if one could get himself toned down to where he could look upon these curtains without passion he would then perceive that it takes both of them together to be the ugliest color known to art.
We have considered these two yellows,Ⓐapparatus note but they do not exhaust the matter, there is still another one in the room. This is a lofty and sumptuous canopy over the brass bedstead,Ⓐapparatus note and is made of brilliant and shinyⒶapparatus note and shouting lemon-coloredⒶapparatus note satin—genuine satin, almost the only genuine thing in the whole room. It is of the nobility, it is of the aristocracy, it belongs with the majestic white pillars and the dainty old marble fireplaceⒶapparatus note; all the rest of the room’s belongings are profoundly plebeian, they are exiles, they are sorrowful outcastsⒶapparatus note from their rightful home,Ⓐapparatus note which is the poor houseⒶapparatus note.
On the wall of the front end, in large frames, hang photographs of the pair who are responsible for the Countess’s presence in this world. It would be in better taste if they looked less gratified about it.Ⓐapparatus note On the end wall of the yellow half of the room hang a couple of framed engravings, female angels engaged in their customary traffic of transporting departed persons to heavenⒶapparatus note over a distant prospect of city and plain and mountain.
The discords of this room, in colors, in humble poverty and showy and self-complacent pretentiousness,Ⓐapparatus note are repeated everywhere one goes in the huge house.Ⓐapparatus note
I am weary of particulars. OneⒶapparatus note may travelⒶapparatus note two hundred feet down either side of the house, through an aimless jumble of useless little reception rooms and showy corridors, finding nothing sane or homelike till he reaches the dining room at the end.
On the next floor,Ⓐapparatus note over the Blackwood library,Ⓐapparatus note there is a good bedroom well furnished, and with a fine stone balcony and the majestic view,Ⓐapparatus note just mentionedⒺexplanatory note,Ⓐapparatus note enlarged and improved. Thence northwardⒶapparatus note two hundred feet cut up in much the same disarray as is that ground floor. But in the midst is a great drawing-roomⒶapparatus note about forty feet square and perhaps as many high,Ⓐapparatus note handsomely and tastefully hung with brocaded silk,Ⓐapparatus note and with a very beautifully frescoed ceiling. But the place has a most angryⒶapparatus note look; for, scattered all about it are divans and sofas and chairs and lofty window-hangingsⒶapparatus note of that same fierce lemon-coloredⒶapparatus note satin heretofore noted as forming the canopy of the brass bedstead down stairs. When one steps suddenly into that great place on a splendid Florentine day it is like entering hellⒶapparatus note on a Sunday morning when the brightest and yellowest brimstone fires are going.
[begin page 239]I think I have said that the top floor has twenty rooms. They are not furnished, they are spacious,Ⓐapparatus note and from all of them one has a wide and charming view.Ⓐapparatus note Properly furnished they would be pleasant, homelike,Ⓐapparatus note and in every way satisfactory.
End of March. Now that we have lived in this house four and one-half months my prejudices have fallen away one by one, and the place has become very homelike to me. Under certain conditions I should like to go on living in it indefinitely. Indeed I could reduce the conditions to two and be quite satisfied. I should want that stable over which the Countess lives, since it is not pleasant to have the horses stabled under Mrs. Clemens’s bed-chamberⒶapparatus note. Also I should wish the Countess to move out of Italy; out of Europe; out of the planet. I should want her bonded to retire to her place in the next world and inform me which of the two it was, so that I could arrange for my own hereafter.
The friends who secured this house for me while I was still in America were as well acquainted with the Countess’s pestiferous character as was gossipy Florence, but they allowed her to beguile them into the belief that she was going to Paris to live as soon as her expensive house was off her hands.Ⓐapparatus note It was a mistake. She never meant to go. She could not endure life without the daily and hourly society of her handsome chief manservantⒶapparatus note, and she was not rich enough to take him along.
There being nothing in the lease requiring the Countess to go to Paris or to some other heavenⒶapparatus note suited to her style, I soon realized that there was no way of abolishing her; and so after two and a half months of her odorous presence in the neighborhood, her stable dwelling being within the grounds of the estate, I gave it up and have been house hunting ever since. House hunting in any country is difficult and depressing, in the regions skirting Florence it leads to despair, and if persisted in will end in suicide. Professor Willard Fiske,Ⓐapparatus note the scholar, who bought the Walter Savage Landor villaⒺexplanatory note fourteen or fifteen years ago, tells me that he examined three hundred villas before he found one that would suit him; yet he was a widower without child or dependentⒶapparatus note, and merely needed a villa for his lone self. I was in it twelve years ago and it seemed to me that he had not bought a villa but only a privilege—the privilege of building it over again and making it humanly habitable. During the first three weeks of February I climbed around,Ⓐapparatus note over and prowled through an average of six large villas a week but found none that would answer, in the circumstances. One of the circumstances and the most important of all being that we are in Italy by the command of physicians in the hope that in this mild climate Mrs. Clemens will get her health back. She suddenly lost it nineteen months ago,Ⓐapparatus note being smitten helpless by nervous prostration complicated with an affection of the heart of several years’Ⓐapparatus note standing, and the times since this collapse that she has been able to stand on her feet five minutes at a time have been exceedingly rare. I have examined two villas that were about as large as this one, but the interior architecture was so ill contrived that there was not comfortable room in them for my family of four persons. As a rule the bed-chambersⒶapparatus note served as commonⒶapparatus note hallways, which means that for centuries Tom,Ⓐapparatus note Dick and Harry of both sexes and all ages have moved in procession to and fro through those ostensibly private rooms.
Every villa I examined had a number of the details which I was ordered to find, four possessed almost every one of them. In the case of the four the altitudes were not satisfactory to the doctorsⒶapparatus note; two of them were too high, the other pair too low. These fifteen or twenty villas [begin page 240] were all furnished. The reader of these notes will find that word in the dictionary, and it will be defined there; but that definition can have no value to a person who is desiring to know what the word means over here when it is attached to an advertisement proposing to let a dwelling-houseⒶapparatus note. Here it means a meagre and scattering array of cheap and rickety chairs, tables,Ⓐapparatus note sofas etc., upholstered in worn and damaged fragments of sombre and melancholy hue that suggest the grave and compel the desire to retire to it. The average villa is properly a hospital for ailing and superannuated furniture. In its best days this furniture was never good nor comely nor attractive nor comfortable. When that best day was, was too long ago for any one to be able to date it now.
Each time that I have returned from one of these quests I have been obliged to concede that the insurrection of color in this VillaⒶapparatus note di Quarto is a rest to the eye after what I had been sighing and sorrowing over in those others, and that this is the only villa in the market so far as I know that has furniture enough in it for the needs of the occupants.
Also I will concede that I was wrong in thinking this villa poverty-strickenⒶapparatus note in the matter of conveniences; for by contrast with those others this house is rich in conveniences.
Some time ago a lady told me that she had just returned from a visit to the country palace of a Princess, a huge building standing in the midst of a great and beautiful and carefully kept flower garden, the garden in its turn being situated in a great and beautiful private park. She was received by a splendid apparition of the footman species who ushered her into a lofty and spacious hall richly garnished with statuary, pictures and other ornaments, fine and costly, and thence down an immensely long corridor which shone with a similar garniture, superbⒶapparatus note and showy to the last degree; and at the end of this enchanting journey she was delivered into the Princess’s bed-chamberⒶapparatus note and received by the Princess,Ⓐapparatus note who was ailing slightly, and in bed. The room was very small, it was without bric-à-bracⒶapparatus note or prettinesses for the comfort of the eye and spirit, the bedstead was iron, there were two wooden chairs and a small table, and in the corner stood an iron tripod which supported a common white wash-bowl. The costly glories of the house were all for show, no money had been wasted on its mistress’s comfort. I had my doubts about this story when I first acquired it, I am more credulous now.
A word or two more concerning the furnishings of the Villa di Quarto. The rooms contain an average of four pictures each, say two photographs or engravings and two oil or water-colorⒶapparatus note paintings of chromo degree. A number of these paintings are from the Countess’s hand, and several of them exhibit talent of a moderate sort. One of her works is a portrait, apparently from a photograph, of the Philadelphia man whose intimacies with her enabled her first husband to relieve himself of her society by divorce. This divorced lady was flourishing under her maiden name of Paxton when she was married to the Count in Philadelphia. In America she is a married woman, in Italy she is not.
She has studied artⒶapparatus note. Twenty-five or thirty drawingsⒶapparatus note upholster the walls of a north room of this house—Ⓐapparatus note which must have been her studio. TheseⒶapparatus note nude men and women areⒶapparatus note of the detailed and uncompromising nakedness which isⒶapparatus note the special product of class instruction in the artⒶapparatus note schools. If I read the Countess aright, it cost her a pang not to hang them in the drawing-room.Ⓐapparatus note
High up on the walls of the great entrance hall hang several of those little shinyⒶapparatus note white cherubs [begin page 241] which one associates with the name of Della RobbiaⒺexplanatory note. The walls of this hall are furtherⒶapparatus note decorated, or at least relieved, by the usual great frameless oval oil portraits of long-departedⒶapparatus note aristocrats which one customarily finds thus displayed in all Florentine villas. In the present case the portraits were painted by artists of chromo rank,Ⓐapparatus note with the exception of one. As I have had no teaching in artⒶapparatus note I cannot decide what is a good picture and what isn’t,Ⓐapparatus note according to the established standards; I am obliged to depend on my own crude standards. According to these the picture which I am now considering sets forth a most noble, grave,Ⓐapparatus note and beautiful face, faultless in all details, and with beautiful and faultless hands; and if it belonged to me I would never take a lesson in artⒶapparatus note lest the picture lose for me its finished,Ⓐapparatus note complete,Ⓐapparatus note and satisfying perfectionⒺexplanatory note.Ⓐapparatus note
The Countess is two or three years past forty, and by the generous supply of portraits and photographs of her distributed over the house one perceives that she has once been comely and at intervals pretty. She now paints her face and dyes her hair, and in other ways tries to preserve the tradition of those lost days; but she carries that within her which defeats the dearest efforts of art and spoils their attempts to keep her exterior aspects in satisfactory shape. That interior something is her spirit, her disposition. She is excitable, malicious, malignant, vengeful, unforgiving, selfish, stingy, avaricious, coarse, vulgar, profane, obscene, a furious blusterer on the outside and at heart a coward. Her lips are as familiar with lies, deceptions, swindles and treacheries as are her nostrils with breath. She has not a single friend in Florence, she is not received in any house. I think she is the best hated person I have ever known, and the most liberally despised. She is an oppressor by nature, and a taker of mean advantages. She is hated by every peasant and every person on the estate and in the neighborhood of it, with the single exception of her paramour, the steward. She told me that when she bought the estate the first thing she did was to drive from it every peasant family but one. She did not make this as a confession, the whole tone of it was that of a boast, and nowhereⒶapparatus note in it was there any accent of pity. She knew that those people and their fathers had held those small homes for generations, and had by authority of the kindly customs of the country regarded them as being secure to them so long as their conduct should remain good. She knew that to turn them out upon the world was to them a terrible calamity; that it was almost the equivalent to sweeping Islanders into the sea. She knew that these people were bound to their homes by their heart-strings. One of the peasants whom she evicted lived six weeks and died with nothing the matter with him. That is, nothing the matter with him that a physician’s drugs could reach, nothing that is named in the medical man’s books, nothing for which his science has provided either diagnosis or remedy. The man’s friends had no doubts as to the nature of his malady. They said his heart was where anybody’s heart would be—in his home; and that when that was taken from him his heart went with it, and thereby his life was spoiled, and noⒶapparatus note longer livable with profit. The Countess boasted to me that nothing American is still left in her, and that she is wholly Italian now. She plainly regarded this as a humiliation for America, and she as plainly believed she was gracing Italy with a compliment of a high and precious order. America still stands. Italy may survive the benefaction of the Countess’s approval, we cannot tell.
There is something pathetically comical about this forlorn exile’s dream and its failure. She imagined that a title was all that was needed to frank her into the heavenⒶapparatus note of the privileged orders of Europe, whereas she finds she is not even able to penetrate the outer fringe of it. She [begin page 242] overlooked an all important detail—money. If she had had that her destitution of character would not have counted. Lacking that, her soiled name, her execrable nature, and her residence in a stable with her manservant and the other cattle, all count against her. She brought no money, and had none to bring. If she had a credit of ten millions at the bank not many doors would be closed against her; being lean of purse, none is open to her. She has assailed, she has furiously assailed ladies in the street for not returning her visits and for pretending to be out when she called. This is regarded as not good form. Hers is a curious situation. It is good to be a real noble, it is good to be a real American, it is a calamity to be neither the one thing nor the other, a politico-social bastard on both counts.
The trivial maliciousness that this soured outcast can invent! My agent here, a solicitor, paid twenty-five hundred francs—the rent of the first quarter—before we sailed from America, and this secured possession for the first day of November. On that date he tried to put our servants in the house, and the Countess drove him and them away, and he stood it like a little man! She said no one would be allowed to enter until the inventory had been made out and signed. She put that detail off a week, and this gave her an opportunity to rob the house. She removed from it all the furniture she could stow and use in her apartment of twelve rooms over the stable and cattle stalls. We arrived on the 7th, stayed in town two days, to rest my invalid wife from the racking railway journey from Genoa; the Countess’s head servant and the solicitor reported the house in good order, and we made the long drive on the 9th and entered into occupation, to find that no fires had been lighted in the furnaces or elsewhere and that the place was in condition for no office but the preservation of products requiring cold storage.
Jean and our old KatyⒶapparatus note Ⓔexplanatory note had preceded us by half an hour to make sure that everything was in right shape. They found the Countess on hand and lording it over the house which had been taken and paid for; no bed had been prepared for the invalid, the Countess refused to give up the keys to the bedding closets, and said she would not allow a bed to be made for any one until the inventory should have been gone over and signed. She wouldn’t tell where in the vast building our trunks were concealed; otherwise bedding could have been taken from these. When we arrived we soon found out where our trunks were and we set the servants to work to prepare a bed. We selected for Mrs. Clemens the sacred room with the silken tapestry; the Countess forbade the presence in that room of any sick person and appealed to the lease and to my lawyer,Ⓐapparatus note who was present, in support of this prohibition. She was correct in her position. The lease showed that this reptile with the filthy soul had protected her house and her body against physical contamination by inserting in the lease a clause prohibiting the lessee from introducing into that particular bedroom any person suffering from an illness of any kind whether contagious or otherwise, and whether the illness might be “large or small” to use the words of the translation of the lease; and to these rigors she had added a clause breaking the lease in case I should bring a contagious disease into the house. All these sillinesses my salaried ass had conceded.
During the fifteen months that Mrs. Clemens had been a helpless invalid she had constantly received the gentle courtesies and kindly attentions which human beings of whatsoever rank or nationality always and everywhere accord to helplessness. ThisⒶapparatus note American Countess was the first of the race to deny these graces and to inflict physical pain and damage instead.
Considering the known character of the woman the lease was notⒶapparatus note a curiosity, for it left [begin page 243] many loopholes for the gratification of her whims and caprices and malices, but left no holes for our escape or defenceⒶapparatus note. Her rights were set forth in detail in writing, in every instance, whereas some of our most important ones had no protection other than her oral promises. These promises were ignored and repudiated from the start, and quite frankly. By oral promise we could occupy as much of the stable as we pleased, but the written lease confined us to the stable under Mrs. Clemens’s room. By oral agreement she was to leave the estate as soon as we moved in—a most important detail, and by all means should have been in writing, for no one acquainted with the Countess would endure the stench of her presence within a mile of his dwelling if it could be helped. By oral promise we were to have command of the reservoir which furnished water to the house—which was another exceedingly important detail; but as it was not in writing she was able to keep that command herself and she continues to keep it, and now and then to use it against our convenience and our health. The lease gave us not a single privilege outside the building except exit and entrance through the grounds; we were not consulted as to what hours the great gates should be open, it pleased her to close them for the night at six o’clock wherefore we were not only prisoners from that time until the next morning, but we were disastrously unaware of it because she gave us no notice. I say disastrously for the reason that upon one occasion our expensive Florentine specialist,Ⓐapparatus note ProfessorⒶapparatus note Grocco, with his assistant physician arrived at the outer gate four hundred yards from the villa at six o’clock in the evening and found the gate locked. There being no bell there was no way to give us notice. The assistant, Dr. Nesti, went scouting and found a gate open which led into the podere; through this they drove unimpeded to the villa. The pretext for closing the great gates out at the main road and those contiguous to our house was to protect the podere from thieves, whereas that podereⒺexplanatory note gate was often left open all night.
The Countess invented various other ways to inconvenience us, and I supposed that the motive was merely and solely malice, but it turns out that that was not the whole of it. She was trying to force us to throw pecuniary advantages in the way of her temporary husband, her chief manservant. She had expected that we would buy all supplies through him and thus extend to him the same opportunities to rob us which he was enjoying in robbing her. She was curiously communicative in this matter. She told me I had made a mistake in not buying the winter’s fuel through that man; and in not buying the winter supply of wine and oil through him; and in not furnishing a cart and horse to our cook wherewith to drive into Florence daily for the perishable foods for the table; and in not getting him to have our washing done for us; and in not making it worth his while to be friendly with us as regards the water; since he could shut it off whenever he pleased, and could also waste it and make it necessary for us to buy water outside and have it hauled to us—a thing which he did once for a week or two.
The lease forbade me to add an improvement or a convenience anywhere about the house without first getting her consent in writing. Our physicians were three or four miles away in Florence; several times Mrs. Clemens had desperate need of them, and each time it cost us more than an hour and a half of precious time to send in and get them. A telephone was necessary, and I asked the Countess to allow me to put one in. She said I might, but that she must be sent for when the telephone people should arrive to put in the instrument, so that she might determine for herself whereabouts in the house she would allow it to be located. It did not occur [begin page 244] to me to ask her to put the permission in writing, for I was not yet able to realize that I was not dealing with a human being but with a reptile. Through Mr. Cecchi,Ⓐapparatus note the manager of the bank,Ⓐapparatus note the contract was at once made with the Telephone Company; there were twenty-seven orders ahead of me, but by courtesy of the Company and in consideration of the desperate need I had of the telephone, I was placed at the head of the list; my instrument was promptly put in, and in the last days of January it began its work in perfect order. It maintained this perfect order an hour and then died. During a whole month thereafter Mr. Cecchi did his best to find out what the trouble was. The Company furnished all sorts of excuses except rational ones, and still the telephone remained dumb. Close upon the end of January I heard from a trustworthy source that the Countess had said to a friend of hers, the only one she has in Italy apparently, that if I had put the telephone matter into the hands of her paramour there would never have been any trouble about it. I went to town and Mr. Cecchi telephoned the Company and asked them to state once for all when they proposed to blow the breath of life into my telephone. They answered that the Countess was threatening them with a suit for eighteen francs damage which they had caused by erecting a telephone pole in her podere, the actual damage being, if anything, not above five francs. Also that they had just received an order from the Countess, accompanied by a threat from her lawyer, requiring them to take my telephone out on or before the fourthⒶapparatus note day of February at noon. I asked Mr. Cecchi to say to the Company that if I found myself unable to communicate with my house by telephone before sunset I should bring suit for twenty-five thousand francs damages for failure to fulfill their contract with me. Communication with my house was perfected within the hour, and has never since been interrupted. The Countess’s excuse for forbidding a telephone whose special and particular office was to speedily call physicians to save a neighbor’s threatened life, was that I had no permission from her in writing and had not notified her to come and say where the instrument might be placed. I was losing my belief in hellⒶapparatus note until I got acquainted with the Countess Massiglia.
We have lived in a Florentine villa before. This was twelve years ago. This was the Villa Viviani, and was pleasantly and commandingly situated on a hill in the suburb of SettignanoⒶapparatus note, overlooking Florence and the great valley. It was secured for us and put in comfortable order by a good friend,Ⓐapparatus note Mrs. Ross,Ⓐapparatus note whose stately castle was a twelve minutes’ walk awayⒺexplanatory note. She still lives there, and hasⒶapparatus note been a help to us more than once since we got into the fangs of the titled animal who owns the Villa di Quarto. The year spent in the Villa VivianiⒺexplanatory note was something of a contrast to the five months which we have now spent in this ducal barrack. Among my old manuscripts and random and spasmodic diaries I find some account of that pleasantly remembered year, and will make some extracts from the same and introduce them here.
When we were passing through FlorenceⒺexplanatory note in the spring of ’92 on our way to Germany, the diseased world’s bath-house, we began negotiationsⒶapparatus note for a villa, and friends of ours completed them after we were gone. When we got back three or four months later, everything was ready, even to the servants and the dinner. It takes but a sentence to state that, but it makes an indolent person tired to think of the planning and work and trouble that lie concealed in it. For it is less trouble and more satisfaction to bury two families than to select and equip a home for one.
The situation of the villa wasⒶapparatus note perfect. It wasⒶapparatus note three miles from Florence, on the side of a hill. The flowery terrace on which it stoodⒶapparatus note looked down upon sloping olive groves and vineyards; [begin page 245] to the right, beyond some hill-spurs, was Fiesole, perched upon its steep terraces; in the immediate foreground wasⒶapparatus note the imposing mass of the Ross castle, its walls and turrets rich with the mellow weather-stains of forgotten centuries; in the distant plain layⒶapparatus note Florence, pink and gray and brown, with the rustyⒶapparatus note huge dome of the cathedral dominating its centreⒶapparatus note like a captive balloon, and flanked on the right by the smaller bulb of the Medici chapel and on the left by the airy tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; allⒶapparatus note around the horizon was a billowy rim of lofty blue hills, snowed white with innumerable villas. After nine months of familiarity with this panorama, I still think, as I thought in the beginning, that this is the fairest picture on our planet, the most enchanting to look upon, the most satisfying to the eye and the spirit. To see the sun sink down,Ⓐapparatus note drowned in his pink and purple and golden floods, and overwhelm Florence with tides of color that make all the sharp lines dim and faint and turn the solid city to a city of dreams, is a sight to stir the coldest nature and make a sympathetic one drunk with ecstasy.Ⓐapparatus note
Sept. 26. ’92.Ⓐapparatus note Arrived in Florence. Got my head shaved. This was a mistake. Moved to the villa in the afternoon. Some of the trunks brought up in the evening by the contadino—if that is his title. He is the man who lives on the farm and takes care of it for the owner, the Marquis. The contadino is middle-aged and like the rest of the peasants—that is to say, brown, handsome, good-natured, courteous, and entirely independent without making any offensive show of it. He charged too much for the trunks, I was told. My informant explained that this was customary.
Sept. 27. The rest of the trunks brought up this morning. He charged too much again, but I was told that this also was customary. It is all right, then. I do not wish to violate the customsⒶapparatus note. Hired landau, horses and coachman. Terms, four hundred and eightyⒶapparatus note francs a month and a pourboire to the coachman, I to furnish lodging for the man and the horses, but nothing else. The landau has seen better days and weighs thirty tons. The horses are feeble, and object to the landau; they stop and turn around every now and then and examine it with surprise and suspicion. This causes delay. But it entertainsⒶapparatus note the people along the road. They came out and stood around with their hands in their pockets and discussed the matter with each other. I was toldⒶapparatus note they said that a forty-ton landau was not the thing for horses like those—what they needed was a wheelbarrow.
I will insert in this place some notes made in October concerning the villa:Ⓐapparatus note
ThisⒶapparatus note is a two-story house. It is not an old house—from an ItalianⒶapparatus note standpoint, I mean. No doubt there has always been a nice dwelling on this eligible spot since a thousand years b.c.; but this present one is said to be only two hundred years old. Outside, it is a plain square building like a box, and is painted a light yellow and has green window-shutters. It stands in a commanding position on an artificial terrace of liberal dimensions which is walled around with strong masonry. From the walls the vineyards and olive orchards of the estate slantⒶapparatus note away toward the valley; the garden about the house is stocked with flowers and a convention of lemon bushes in great crockery tubs; there are several tall trees—stately stone pines—also fig trees and trees of breeds not familiar to me; roses overflow the retaining-walls and the battered and mossy stone urns on the gate-posts in pink and yellow cataracts, exactly as they do on the drop-curtains of theatres; there are gravel walks shut in by tall laurel hedges. A back corner of the terrace is occupied by a dense grove of old ilex trees. There is a stone table in there, with stone benches around it. No shaft of sunlight can penetrate that grove. It is always deep twilight in there, even when all outside is flooded [begin page 246] with the intense sun-glare common to this region. The carriage road leads from the inner gate eight hundred feet to the public road, through the vineyard, and there one may take the horse-car for the city, and will find it a swifterⒶapparatus note and handier convenience than a sixty-ton landau. On the east (or maybe it is the south) front of the house is the VivianiⒶapparatus note coat of arms in plaster, and near it a sun dial which keeps very good time.
TheⒶapparatus note house is a very fortress for strength. The main walls—of brick covered with plaster—are about three feet thick; the partitions of the rooms, also of brick, are nearly the same thickness. The ceilings of the rooms on the ground floor are more than twenty feet high, those of the upper floors are also higher than necessary. I have several times tried to count the rooms in the house, but the irregularities baffle me. There seem to be twenty-eightⒶapparatus note.
The ceilings are frescoed, the walls are papered. All the floors are of red brick covered with a coating of polished and shining cement which is as hard as stone and looks like it; for the surfaces have been painted in patterns, first in solid colors and then snowed over with varicolored freckles of paint to imitate granite and other stones. Sometimes the body of the floor is an imitation of gray granite with a huge star or otherⒶapparatus note ornamental pattern of imitation fancy marbles in the centre; with a two-foot band of imitationⒶapparatus note red granite all around the room whose outer edge is bordered with a six-inch stripe of imitation lapis-lazuliⒶapparatus note; sometimes the body of the floor is red granite, then the gray is used as a bordering stripe. There are plenty of windows, and worlds of sun and light; these floors are slick and shiny and full of reflections, for each is a mirror in its way, softly imaging all objects after the subdued fashion of forest lakes.
There is a tiny family chapel on the main floor, with benches for ten or twelve persons, and over the little altar is an ancient oil painting which seems to me to be as beautiful and as rich in tone as any of those Old-Master performances down yonder in the galleries of the Pitti and the UffiziⒶapparatus note. Botticelli, for instance; I wish I had time to make a few remarks about Botticelli—whose real name was probably Smith.
The curious feature of the house is the salon. This is a spacious and lofty vacuum which occupies the centre of the house; all the rest of the house is built around it; itⒶapparatus note extends up through both stories and its roof projects some feet above the rest of the building. That vacuum is very impressive. The sense of its vastness strikes you the moment you step into it and cast your eyes around it and aloft. I tried many names for it: the Skating Rink, the Mammoth Cave, the Great Sahara, and so on, but none exactly answered. There are five divans distributed along its walls; they make little or no show, though their aggregate length is fifty-sevenⒶapparatus note feet. A piano in it is a lost object. We have tried to reduce the sense of desert space and emptiness with tables and things, but they have a defeated look and do not do any good. Whatever stands or moves under that soaring painted vault is belittled.
Over the six doors are huge plaster medallions which are supported by great naked and handsome plaster boys, and in these medallions are plaster portraits in high relief of some grave and beautiful men in stately official costumes of a long past day—Florentine senators and judges, ancient dwellers here and owners of this estate. The date of one of them is 1305—middle-aged, then, and a judge—he could have known, as a youth, the very creators of Italian art, andⒶapparatus note he could have walked and talked with Dante, and probably did. The date of another is 1343—he could have known BoccaccioⒶapparatus note and spent his afternoons yonder in Fiesole gazing down on plague-reeking Florence and listening to that man’s improper tales, and he probably did. The date of another is 1463—he could have met Columbus, and he knew the Magnificent LorenzoⒺexplanatory note, of course. These are all Cerretanis—or Cerretani-Twains, asⒶapparatus note I may say, for I have adopted myself into their family on account of its antiquity, my origin having been heretofore too recent to suit me.
But I am forgetting to state what it is about that Rink that is so curious—which is, that [begin page 247] it is not really vast, but only seems so. It is an odd deception, and unaccountable; but a deception it is. Measured by the eye it is sixtyⒶapparatus note feet square and sixtyⒶapparatus note high; but I have been applying the tape-line, and find it to be but fortyⒶapparatus note feet square and fortyⒶapparatus note high. These are the correct figures; and what is interestingly strange is, that the place continues to look as big now as it did before I measured it.
This is a good house, but it cost very little, and is simplicity itself, and pretty primitive in most of its features. The water is pumped to the ground floor fromⒶapparatus note a well by hand labor, and then carried up stairs by hand. There is no drainage; the cesspools are right under the windows. This is the case with everybody’s villa.
The doors in this house are like the doors of the majority of the houses and hotels of Italy—plain, thin, unpaneled boards painted white. This makes the flimsiest and most unattractive door known to history. The knob is not a knob, but a thing like the handle of a gimlet—you can get hold of it only with your thumb and forefinger. Still, even that is less foolish than our American door-knob, which is always getting loose and turning futilely round and round in your hand, accomplishing nothing.
The windows are all of the rational continental breed; they open apart, like doors; and when they are bolted for the night they don’t rattle, and a person can go to sleep.
There are cunning little fireplacesⒶapparatus note in the bedrooms and sitting-roomsⒶapparatus note, and lately a big aggressive looking German stove has been set up on the south frontier of the Great Sahara.
The stairsⒶapparatus note are made of granite blocks, the hallways of the second floor are of red brick. It is a safe house. Earthquakes cannot shake it down, fire cannot burn it. There is absolutely nothing burnable but the furniture, the curtains and the doors. There is not much furniture,Ⓐapparatus note it is merely summer furniture—or summer bareness, if you like.Ⓐapparatus note When a candle set fire to the curtains in a room over my head the other night where samples of the family slept, I was wakened out of my sleep by shouts and screams, and was greatly terrified until an answer from the window told me what the matter was:Ⓐapparatus note that the window curtains and hangings were on fire. In America I should have been more frightened than ever, then, but this was not the case here. I advised the samples to let the fireⒶapparatus note alone, and go to bed; which they did, and by the time they got to sleep there was nothing of the attacked fabricsⒶapparatus note left. We boast a good deal in America of our fire departments, the most efficient and wonderful in the world, but they have something better than that to boast of in Europe—a rational system of building which makes human life safe from fire and renders fire departments needless. We boast of a thing which we ought to be ashamed to require.
This villa has a roomy look, a spacious look; and when the sunshine is pouring in and lighting up the bright colors of the shiny floors and walls and ceilings there is a large and friendly suggestion of welcome about the aspects, but I do not know that I have ever seen a continental dwelling which quite met the American standard of a home in all the details. There is a trick about an American house that is like the deep-lying untranslatable idioms of a foreign language—a trick uncatchable by the stranger, a trick incommunicable and undescribable; and that elusive trick, that intangible something, whatever it is, is just the something that gives the home look and the home feeling to an American house and makes it the most satisfying refuge yet invented by men—and women, mainly women. The American house is opulent in soft and varied colors that please and rest the eye, and in surfaces that are smooth and pleasant to the touch, in forms that are shapely and graceful, in objects without number which compel interest and cover nakedness; and the night has even a higher charm than the day, there, for the artificial lights do really give light instead of merely trying and failing; and under their veiled and tinted glow all the snug cosiness and comfort and charm of the place is at its best and loveliest. But when night shuts down on [begin page 248] the continental home there is no gas or electricity to fight it, but only dreary lamps of exaggerated ugliness and of incomparable poverty in the matter of effectiveness.Ⓐapparatus note
Sept. 29. ’92.Ⓐapparatus note I seem able to forget everything except that I have had my head shaved. No matter how closely I shut myself away from drafts it seems to be always breezy up there. But the main difficulty is the flies. They like it upⒶapparatus note there better than anywhere else; on account of the view, I suppose. It seems to me that I have never seen any flies before that were shod like these. These appear to have talons. Wherever they put their foot down they grab. They walk over my head all the time, and cause me infinite torture. It is their park, their club, their summer resort. They have garden parties there, and conventions, and all sorts of dissipation. And they fear nothing. All flies are daring, but these are more daring than those of other nationalities. These cannot be scared away by any device. They are more diligent, too, than the other kinds: they come before daylight and stay till after dark. But there are compensations. The mosquitoes are not a trouble. There are very few of them, they are not noisy, and not much interested in their calling. A single unkind word will send them away, if said in English, which impresses them because they do not understand it, then they come no more that night. We often see them weep when they are spoken to harshly. I have got some of the eggs to take home. If this breed can be raised in our climate they will be a great advantage. There seem to be no fleas here. This is the first time we have struck this kind of an interregnum in fifteen months. Everywhere else the supply exceeds the demand.
Oct. 1. Finding that the coachman was taking his meals in the kitchen, IⒶapparatus note reorganized the contract to include his board, at thirtyⒶapparatus note francs a month. That is what it would cost him up above us in the village, and I think I can feed him for two hundredⒶapparatus note and save thirtyⒶapparatus note out of it. Saving thirtyⒶapparatus note is better than not saving anything.
That passage from the diary reminds me that I did an injudicious thing along about that time which bore fruit later. As I was to give the coachman, Vittorio,Ⓐapparatus note a monthly pourboire, ofⒶapparatus note course I wanted to know the amount. So I asked the coachman’s padrone (master), instead of asking somebody else—anybody else. He said thirtyⒶapparatus note francs a month would be about right. I was afterwards informed that this was an overcharge, but that it was customary, there being no customary charges except overcharges. However, at the end of that month the coachman demanded an extra pourboire of fifteenⒶapparatus note francs. When I asked why, he said his padrone had taken his other pourboire away from him. The padrone denied this in Vittorio’sⒶapparatus note presence, and Vittorio seemed to retract. The padrone said he did, and he certainly had that aspect, but IⒶapparatus note had to take the padrone’s word for it as interpreter of the coachman’s Italian. When the padrone was gone the coachman resumed the charge, and as we liked him—and also believed him—we made his aggregate pourboire forty-fiveⒶapparatus note francs a month after that, and never doubted that the padrone took two-thirds of it. We were told by citizens that it was customary for the padrone to seizeⒶapparatus note a considerable share of hisⒶapparatus note dependents’ pourboire, and also the custom for the padrone to deny it. That padrone is an accommodating man, and a most capable and agreeable talker, speaking English like an archangel, and making it next to impossible for a body to be dissatisfied with him; yet his seventy-tonⒶapparatus note landau has kept us supplied with lame horses for nine months, whereas we were entitled to a light carriage suited to hill-climbing, and fastidious people would have made him furnish it.
The Cerretani family, of old and high distinction in the great days of the Republic, lived on this place during many centuries. Along in October we began to notice a pungent and suspicious [begin page 249] odor which we were not acquainted with and which gave us some little apprehension, but I laid it on the dog, and explained to the familyⒶapparatus note that that kind of a dog always smelt that way when he was up to windward of the subject, but privately I knew it was not the dog at all. I believed it was our adopted ancestors, the Cerretanis. I believed they were preserved under the house somewhere, and that it would be a good scheme to get them out and air them. But I was mistaken. I made a secret search and had to acquit the ancestors. It turned out that the odor was a harmless one. It cameⒶapparatus note from the wine-crop, which was stored in a part of the cellars to which we had no access. This discovery gave our imaginations a rest; and it turned a disagreeable smell into a pleasant one. But not until we had so long and so lavishly flooded the house with odious disinfectants that the dog left and the family had to camp in the yard most of the time. It took two months to disinfect the disinfectants and persuade our wealth of atrocious stenches to emigrate. When they wereⒶapparatus note finally all gone and the wine-fragrance resumed business at the old stand, we welcomed it with effusion and have had no fault to find with it since.
Oct. 6. I find myself at a disadvantage here. FourⒶapparatus note persons in the house speak Italian and nothing else, one person speaks German and nothing else, the rest of the talk is in the French, English and profane languages. I am equipped with but the merest smattering in these tongues, if I except one or two. Angelo speaks French—a French which he could get a patent on, because he invented it himself; a French which no one can understand, a French which resembles no other confusion of sounds heard since Babel, a French which curdles the milk. He prefers it to his native Italian. He loves to talk it; loves to listen toⒶapparatus note himself; to him it is music; he will not let it alone. The family would like to get their little Italian savings into circulation, but he will not give change. It makes no difference what language he is addressed in, his reply is in French—his peculiar French, his gratingⒶapparatus note uncanny French, which sounds like shoveling anthracite down a coal-chute. I know a few Italian words and several phrases, and along at first I used to keep them bright and fresh by whetting them on Angelo; but he partly couldn’t understand them and partly didn’t want to, so I have been obliged to withdraw them from the market for the present. But this is only temporary. I am practisingⒶapparatus note, I am preparing. Some day I shall be ready for him, and not in ineffectual French, but in his native tongue. I will seethe this kid in its mother’s milk.
Oct. 27. The first month is finished. We are wonted, now. It is agreed that life at a Florentine villa is an ideal existence. The weather is divine, the outside aspects lovely, the days and the nights tranquil and reposeful, the seclusion from the world and its worries as satisfactory as a dream. There is no housekeeping to do, no plans to make, no marketing to superintend—all these things do themselves, apparently. One is vaguely aware that somebody is attending to them, just as one is aware that the world is being turned over and the constellations worked and the sun shoved around according to the schedule, but that is all; one does not feel personally concerned, or in any way responsible. Yet there is no head, no chief executive; each servant minds his or her own department, requiring no supervision and having none. They hand in elaborately itemized bills once a week, then the machinery goes silently on again, just as before. There is no noise, or fussing, or quarreling or confusion—upⒶapparatus note stairs. I don’t know what goes on below. Late in the afternoons friends come out from the city and drink tea in the open air, and tell what is happeningⒶapparatus note in the world; and when the great sun sinks down upon Florence and the daily miracle begins, they hold their breath and look. It is not a time for talk.
January] The first part of this dictation, through “under Providence” (237.8), survives in a typescript made by Jean Clemens in 1904 and revised by Clemens, now in the Mark Twain Papers. It is the only one of Jean’s Florentine typescripts known to survive.
Villa Reale di Quarto] Olivia’s doctors having advised a milder climate, Clemens removed his family to this Tuscan villa in the autumn of 1903. The family party consisted of Samuel, Olivia, Clara, and Jean, together with Katy Leary, their longtime servant, and Margaret Sherry, a trained nurse. They left New York in the steamer Princess Irene on 24 October, arriving at Genoa on 6 November. They made their way by train to Florence and were installed in the Villa di Quarto by 9 November. Later that month they were joined by Isabel V. Lyon, who had been hired in 1902 as Olivia’s secretary, but had since assumed more general duties; Lyon’s mother accompanied her ( MTB, 3:1209; Notebook 46, TS p. 28, CU-MARK; Hartford Courant: “Clemens Family at Genoa,” 7 Nov 1903, 15; “Mr. Clemens in Florence,” 9 Nov 1903, 1; before 1 Nov 1903 to Unidentified, CU-MARK).
King of Würtemberg] After the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire in 1814, the Villa di Quarto was the home of Jérôme Bonaparte (1784–1860), Napoleon’s youngest brother and the former king of Westphalia. He was not the king of Württemberg, but his wife, Princess Catherine, was a daughter of Frederick I, the first king of Württemberg (1754–1816).
a Russian daughter of the imperial house] The Grand Duchess Maria Nicolaievna (1819–76), a daughter of Tsar Nicholas I, purchased the villa in 1865 (“The Home of an American Countess in Italy,” Town and Country, Sept 1907, 10–13).
Baedeker says it was built by Cosimo I, by [ ], architect] The typescript leaves a blank space for the name, and Clemens added the brackets, fulfilling his promise, further on in the text, to “suppress” the name of the architect (231.35–36). Clemens’s likely source of information, the 1903 Baedeker guide to northern Italy, stated that the Villa di Quarto was built by Niccolò Tribolo (1500–1550) for Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519–74), grand duke of Tuscany. Other sources indicate that the building dates from the preceding century (Baedeker 1903, 525; “The Home of an American Countess in Italy,” Town and Country, Sept 1907, 10–13).
Countess Massiglia] The Countess Massiglia (1861–1953), whom Clemens called “the American bitch who owns this Villa,” was born Frances Paxton, in Philadelphia (25–26 Feb 1904 to Rogers, Salm, in HHR, 557; U.S. National Archives and Records Administration 1950–54). She had been married and divorced before meeting Count Annibale Raybaudi-Massiglia, an Italian diplomat whom she married in about 1891. In addition to his remarks here, Clemens wrote about the countess in an unpublished sketch entitled “The Countess Massiglia” (SLC 1904a), and in his letters and notebooks. His only published mention of her during his lifetime was a glancing blow in a 1905 article, “Concerning Copyright” (Hartford Courant: “Mr. Clemens in Florence,” 9 Nov 1903, 1; “Twain and Countess at Law,” 22 Aug 1904, 7; “The Home of an American Countess in Italy,” Town and Country, Sept 1907, 10; SLC 1905b, 2). By a strange coincidence, Isabel Lyon had known the countess slightly
in Philadelphia about 15 years ago. I came in contact with her because Mr. John Lockwood boarded with her mother at 20th & Cherry Streets. The mother was vicious; & the daughter who was then Mrs. Barney Campau, behaved abominably with Mr. Fred. Lockwood, ruining the happiness of that family. . . . When I saw her as I did the evening of the day that we arrived here—she of course said she had never seen me. I soon made it quite plain to her that she had— But enough— Here she remains, although she said she was going to spend the winter in Paris. She has furnished an apartment over the stables for herself & the big Roman steward of the place—& they two live there together to the annoyance of society. . . . Here she remains, a menace to the peace of the Clemens household, with her painted hair, her great coarse voice—her slitlike vicious eyes—her dirty clothes—& her terrible manners. (Lyon 1903–6, 36–38)
contadini] Peasants, farmers.
Blackwood] Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a British literary monthly.
without her witness was not anything made that was made] Compare John 1:3, “and without him was not any thing made that was made.”
majestic view, just mentioned] Clemens deleted the passage mentioning the view, which originally ended the previous paragraph. It described a “charming room” from which “one has a far stretching prospect of mountain and valley with Florence low-lying and bunched together far away in the middle distance.”
Professor Willard Fiske . . . Walter Savage Landor villa] Fiske (1831–1904) was a scholar of Northern European languages whom the Clemenses had met through their mutual friend Charles Dudley Warner. A seasoned traveler, Fiske twice helped the Clemenses with their arrangements to lease Florentine villas, in 1892 and 1903. Having inherited a vast fortune, in 1892 he purchased a villa that had once belonged to English poet and essayist Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) (Horatio S. White 1925, 3, 393–95; “Like a Romance,” Hartford Courant, 27 May 1890, 3; see also AD, 10 Apr 1906).
little shiny white cherubs which one associates with the name of Della Robbia] The Florentine sculptor Luca della Robbia (1400?–1482) was the principal member of a family of artists who specialized in the use of glazed terra cotta to decorate walls and ceilings.
lesson in art lest the picture . . . perfection] At this point in the text Clemens dictated the following instruction to himself, “Here Insert Rhone Voyage.” He clearly referred to a manuscript entitled “The Innocents Adrift,” a highly fictionalized account of his ten-day boat trip down the Rhône River in September 1891. Clemens never finished it, but he continued to revise it and consider mining it for extracts; a brief one appears in chapter 55 of Following the Equator. In 1923, Paine published an abridged and rewritten version as “Down the Rhône.” Clemens probably did not intend to interpolate it in its entirety. He may have meant to use the section of it wherein his fictive fellow voyagers debate the proper qualifications for the appreciation of high art. But clearly he did not follow through on his intention (SLC 1891a; SLC 1923, 129–68; Arthur L. Scott 1963).
our old Katy] Household servant Katy Leary had sailed with the Clemenses from New York in October 1903. At the time of this dictation she had been in their service for twenty-three years and had long been “regarded,” as Clemens wrote, “as a part of the family” (Notebook 39, TS p. 51, CU-MARK; see also AD, 1 Feb 1906).
podere] Property, estate.
a good friend, Mrs. Ross, whose stately castle was a twelve minutes’ walk away] Janet Duff Gordon Ross (1842–1927), the daughter of a baronet, lived at Poggio Gherardo, a villa that she and her husband had purchased in 1888. She enjoyed a wide social circle of writers and artists, and published several books of her own—a family biography, sketches of Tuscan life, and collections of autobiographical essays. She described her 1892 meeting with Clemens:
In May our friend Professor Fiske, who lived near Fiesole, brought a delightful man to see us, Mr. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. We at once made friends. The more we saw of him the more we liked the kindly, shrewd, amusing, and quaint man. He asked whether there was any villa to be had near by, and from our terrace we showed him Villa Viviani, between us and Settignano. I promised to get him servants and have all ready for the autumn. (Ross 1912, 318–19)
year spent in the Villa Viviani] The Clemenses stayed at the villa from late September 1892 to late March 1893.
When we were passing through Florence] The source of the text from here to the end is Clemens’s manuscript, now in the Mark Twain Papers.
the Magnificent Lorenzo] Lorenzo de’ Medici, known as “the Magnificent” (1449–92), was the effectual ruler of Florence from 1469 to his death.
Source documents.
TS Jean (lost) Typescript made in 1904 by Jean Clemens in Florence from Isabel Lyon’s handwritten record of Clemens’s dictation; now lost.TS2 (incomplete) Typescript, leaves numbered 59–65 (most of 65 and all of 66 are missing), made from TS Jean and revised: ‘Florence . . . of tin.’ (222.7–224.18).
TS4 Typescript, leaves numbered 53–60, made from TS Jean.
NAR 12pf Galley proofs of NAR 12, typeset from the revised TS2, ViU (the same extent as NAR 12).
NAR 12 North American Review 184 (15 February 1907), 344–46: ‘31st January 1904 . . . pleasant comrade.’ (222.7–22); ‘in trading . . . of tin.’ (223.27–224.18).
TS2 and TS4 derive independently from an earlier typescript, now lost, prepared in 1904 in Florence by Jean Clemens, who transcribed the longhand notes taken by Isabel Lyon from Clemens’s dictation. Since either typescript may incorporate authorial readings not present in the other, all of their variants have been reported. When TS2 and TS4 agree, they confirm the readings of the missing TS Jean.
Clemens revised TS2 to serve as printer’s copy for the NAR, cutting away most of page 65 and all of page 66. TS4 contains the complete text, and is therefore the unique source for the portion missing from TS2. This excerpt about Hay was first paired with an anecdote from the AD of 15 March 1906 about Twichell and the barking dog and scheduled for NAR 8 (see the Textual Commentary for that dictation). Ultimately it was combined with Clemens’s comments about his brother Orion from the ADs of 5 April and 6 April 1906 (a topic begun in NAR 11) and published in NAR 12. Someone at the NAR apparently considered shortening the installment on NAR 12pf by marking the entire text of “John Hay” for deletion, but then restored it with the instruction ‘stet’. A phrase in the TS2 text—‘instead of an ungrateful one’ (224.17)—was omitted from NAR 12pf. The same sentence was cut further before publication: the phrase ‘and would be President next year if we were a properly honest and grateful nation’ (224.16–17) was in NAR 12pf but omitted from NAR 12. The source of these revisions, which are not on any extant document, was probably someone at the NAR. Clemens himself made no revisions on this portion of NAR 12pf.
Marginal Notes on TS2 and NARpf Concerning Publication in the NAR